Lessons From David

I gave a sermon a couple weeks ago about Saul, the first king of Israel. What a tragic figure that man is. Here is a man chosen by God to be the king. He was chosen specifically by God. He was given God's Spirit, and he failed over and over again. Eventually, God actually took his Spirit back. And we read where the man slowly went insane. Tried to kill David, tried to murder his own son. Just a tragic story of the first king of Israel. I said we would eventually then go through David. We're going to look at David today. And David is, in many ways, an enigma. I mean, David is highly intelligent. He's a warrior. He's a poet. He's a songwriter. He's a great administrator. And he makes some terrible mistakes. And yet, God says, now there's a man after my own heart. If you remember, I gave a sermon that was probably last spring. I went through Psalm 51. I talked about a woman years ago who came to be very upset because she said she just couldn't figure out why God had anything to do with David. That man should have been killed by God and thrown in a lake of fire. And she just couldn't understand why God would have anything to do with a man that horrible. Because all she saw was his mistakes.

Why did Saul fail? And why did David succeed? Well, this will be interesting, but none of us are kings or queens here, right? I don't think any of us are from royalty. None of us have palaces anyplace. But the lessons we learn from Saul are important to all of us. The lessons we learn from David are important to all of us. These lessons are important to all Christians.

And so as we go through David, let's look at what we need to learn from his experiences. And we're going to take some snapshots. Just like with Saul, we looked at some instances of his life as king, and we told the story around it, and then showed why he failed, why he succeeded at first, and why he failed. We're going to do the similar thing here. We're going to look at some snapshots of David, just like we're looking at a picture. We'll look at the story around the picture, but there's important lessons here that we all need to learn.

When God went to Samuel and said, I have rejected Saul as king, Samuel mourned.

Samuel was devastated. He loved Saul. He respected Saul. And finally, God actually had to tell him, stop mourning. Stop mourning for him. He's not going to come back. He's not going to repent. I have to select another king. So he told him to go to this specific village, find this specific family. Jesse was the father. And there God says, I will tell you who you are to ordain.

And so he gets there, and he finds the man. He goes into his house, and he says, I'm supposed to inspect your sons. And of course, the father says, oh, wait till you meet the firstborn.

He's the smartest one of the bunch. He's athletic. He's brave. He's everything you would want in a leader. And he brings his firstborn son out. And it says that Samuel says, this is the guy.

Anybody can tell, this is the man God has chosen. And God says, no, this isn't the man I've chosen.

Let's look at 1 Samuel 16. We're going to look at one verse here, what God tells him.

And this is going to tell us something about David. 1 Samuel 16.

Verse 7, but the Lord said to Samuel, do not look at his appearance or his physical stature, because I have refused him. This is the man I've chosen. For the Lord does not see as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.

He says, Samuel, I'm looking at a very specific kind of man. Now, remember, I've talked about before in Hebrew when it says heart, it doesn't mean, as we tend to think the word heart in English. You know, when we think of heart as a symbol, it's what your emotions.

The word is deeper than that in Hebrew. It means the very core of who you are, at the very core of what your real emotions are, the very core of your real thoughts, the very core of your motivations. So it includes thoughts. It includes who you are that nobody else knows. And what God says, I'm looking for a man that I can look inside to who he really is and know that this is a good man, a man who will follow me, a man who will do what he's supposed to do. So he's looking for a very specific kind of man, and they bring all of Jesse's sons to Samuel. And one after one, God says, nope, not him. Try another. And finally, he says, is this all your sons? And Jesse says, well, this is the runt. He's not taking care of the sheep, but he's just, he's the boy. I mean, you don't want him. Well, bring him in. And he goes and brings David in, and God says, that's him. And to the surprise of everyone, Samuel ordains him king. Now, you need to understand, you know, just put ourselves back in this time period, almost 3000 years ago. A man is king. When a man is made king of a nation, he establishes a dynasty.

His son is supposed to follow him. And to keep stability inside any nation, the longer the dynasty lasted, the more stable, usually, the country would be. Or there would be constant warfare, even sometimes between the brothers. You know, a father would die, and the brothers would get armies together and fight each other over who's going to be king. So the exchange of power was very seldom was it peaceful, unless you could establish a dynasty.

Saul is the first king of Israel. He is expected by everybody to establish a dynasty.

And now you have a young man, probably at this point still a teenager. And he is now king. Now, you're not supposed to tell anybody, but he gets out. He gets out.

And so you have a real problem here beginning to form, as we're going to see in a little bit, over if I'm king, there can't be two kings. How can you be king? How does David handle that? And how does Saul handle that? Now David now comes on the scene after this.

The first time we really see him come on the scene, because he stays at home. David doesn't go round up some kind of army and try to take over. He simply stays at home.

Probably wondering as he's taking care of the sheep, exactly what does a king do?

What is God going to have me do next? I'm just supposed to stay here until he tells me what to do next. And the next time we have him show up on the scene is with the story of Goliath. Now the situation with Goliath I covered when I talked about Saul. From Saul's viewpoint, Saul was a big man. Saul was a warrior. He wasn't afraid of much anything.

And now here he is confronted by a man who's so big and such a warrior who's probably killed, who knows how many dozens of men. And he can't beat him. Nobody can beat him. Not one man in the entire nation of Israel said, I can beat that man. Nobody can beat this guy.

And they know it. And the two armies are camped across from each other, and every day Goliath comes out and says, send somebody down. The birds are hungry. You know, I've got to feed the vultures. Send somebody down. And David shows up. Now he doesn't show up because he's a soldier or a warrior. David shows up because, well, Dad sent him to bring some food to his brothers who happen to be soldiers. Remember, his dad saw him as the runt. So he shows up with some food, and basically if you read the story, his brothers say, now just be quiet. Don't say anything. Just, you know, stay out of the way, kid. And what's interesting is we don't find much about his mother in the story. Just that his father and his brothers really didn't think much of him.

He shows up and he sees Goliath come out. And he sees him come out, and he blasphemes God, and he challenges Israel. What he says here, as he's brought before Saul because he's saying, what's going on here? This is terrible. His brothers say, shut up, kid. So they bring him before Saul. Let's look at 1 Samuel 17. Let's go to verse 34. Because what he says here is very important. And now we begin to see something about David, a couple of things. But David said to Saul, your servant used to keep his father's sheep, and when a lion or a bear came and took a lamb out of the flock, I went out after it and struck it, and delivered the lamb from its mouth. And when it arose against me, I caught it by its beard, and struck and killed it. Your servant has killed both lion and bear, and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, seeing that he's defied the armies of the living God. Moreover, David said, the Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, he will deliver me from the hand of the Philistine. And Saul said, okay, kid, put my armor on him. Now, of course, Saul was a big man. They put Saul's armor on David. It was too heavy. He couldn't move. He said, take this armor off of me. I can't move.

What we find here, though, because we know the story, David went and confronted Goliath, and God delivered Goliath into David's hands. But we see something very important about David. Remember when Saul went to be ordained king, and they couldn't find him. He was hiding. He just couldn't embrace what God had called him to do. He couldn't wholeheartedly say, yes, I want to do this. I want to be king. Of course, there had never been a king before. He didn't know how to be a king, but he couldn't embrace it. It was a lack of faith. David is embracing his calling. He's not saying, hey, I'm here to be king. He's saying, I am here to lead people to God. God is in charge of this, and we need to follow God here. He's embracing his calling. There's an interesting Bible called the Leadership Bible by John Maxwell. John Maxwell was sort of an expert in management and leadership. He has a company that goes around and helps churches and nonprofits and businesses in their management issues. In the Leadership Bible, he actually goes through the Bible as a commentary. Instead of looking at the theology of the Bible, he looks at what you learn about leadership from the Bible, from a biblical viewpoint. What is godly leadership from a biblical viewpoint? It's a fascinating commentary. He makes a whole list of things here that we learn about David. I'm going to mention a few of them here, not all of them. He says that David has a different conviction.

He brings out an interesting point. He calls him an uncircumcised Philistine. I think, wow, he's just insulting him, you know, because good people are circumcised and bad people are uncircumcised. That's not the point. The point is, as a male Israelite, you had a covenant with God. You had entered into a personal covenant with God because you were circumcised. Your entire family entered into a covenant with God. God had made a covenant with those people. The Philistines were absolute pagans. And what he says is, how can we, as the people that God have made a covenant with, be afraid of a man that has no covenant with God?

How can we be afraid? This man doesn't know God. He has no covenant with God. God has not come into his life, but he has come into our lives. This conviction that's centered around God, not what I could do. I mean, there isn't a man here that would have said, oh, I can go take him. We'd all been standers saying, you go.

I'd been saying, hey, I'm 5'8". The guy's two and a half times bigger than me, okay?

But David, David said, but he doesn't have a covenant with God. Now, this is going to be sort of the theme we're going to find through David's life. God has made a covenant with me, and therefore God is the one in charge of my life. God is the one who is guiding me. Here, where I go. John Maxwell says his motives were different. He says, how dare he talk about the God of Israel this way? How dare he insult God? His vision is different. He's thinking about the promises God makes in his covenant to his covenant of people. And his experiences are different, and I find this interesting too. When you think about David, he says, oh yes, I've come. I'm not afraid of any big guy. What he says is, no, I fought a lion and God helped me. Now, he was afraid when he fought the lion. He might have got scratched up and bit when he fought the lion, but he killed the lion, and in the end he said, I killed him because God did it. He helped me do it. I could have done it on my own. Same thing with the bear. God delivered me from the bear. I had to rush towards him and kill him with a sword or a knife, and it was a vicious battle, and I broke a couple ribs, but God delivered me because I could not have done it myself.

So he recognized where the victory comes from, and he had faith that God would do it.

His attitude was different too. Saul saw Saul. Saul looked at Goliath. He saw someone so big you didn't want to hit him.

David saw someone so big you couldn't miss him. Two human viewpoints. But that's because God made a covenant with me. He has no covenant with God. How dare he challenge God? You see, the first thing we learn about David is the hallmark of his life. He had a vision of who God was. He had a certain understanding of God. You read the Psalms, and you see someone who seeks God and is striving to understand God, and he believed God had a plan for him and actually for Israel, and therefore he was living by that plan. He was living that covenant.

This is a little snapshot of David is, here's a man who believes in the covenant. He actually believes it. And so he goes out, and God delivers Goliath to him. He didn't kill Goliath just because he was good with a slingshot.

God delivered him to him. Now, a second little snapshot of David is a very interesting one.

David, of course, becomes famous in Israel, and we read when we went through about Saul. Saul begins to hate him, and Saul slowly begins to slide into insanity. He tries to kill David, tries to kill his own son, Jonathan. So as Saul begins to go through this sliding away from God and deep into this just deep pit, David ends up having to run. David literally now has to flee for his life because Saul wants to kill him. And so we have this situation where David runs off with a small group of a band of men, and he goes to this little sort of mountaintop, and there he's trying to hide out. So let's pick up the story now in 1 Samuel 24. 1 Samuel 24. For our second snapshot here of David's life.

1 Samuel 24. Now it happened when Saul had returned from following the Philistines. Now Saul's going around and fighting little wars all over the place. Driving back, all the people had been, during the time of Judges, just sort of encouraging onto the land of the different tribes. Because there were various tribes and different other nations around them, and other tribes around them, nomadic tribes, would constantly be attacking them. So Saul now is pushing everybody back and actually trying to form a nation of Israel. And it was told to him, saying, take note, David is in the wilderness of Engeidi. Then Saul took three thousand chosen men from all Israel and went to seek David and his men on the rocks of the wild goats. So he came to the sheepfolds by the road where there was a cave, and Saul went in to attend to his needs. David and his men staying in the recess of the cave. So you've got to visualize this. They're coming up to this hill and, you know, basically the king has to go to the bathroom. So he's not going to do that in front of all his men. So there's a cave there. You know, he goes off into the cave. It happens to be the cave where David and his men are hiding. And the men say to David, this is your chance. God has given you an opportunity. God gave you an opportunity here. I mean, you're king, right? This man, you know, we know God's taking his spirit from him. He's no longer the king.

Kill him. And David pulls out his sword and he creeps up on him. And it's probably the royal robe. He cuts a piece off of the hem of the royal robe. Saul, you know, gets up, puts on his robe, walks outside, and doesn't even realize the back of his robe has been cut. And he goes outside. And David runs out and says, King, I'm begging your forgiveness. I should not have done this to you because you are the king of Israel, but I have cut off your robe. I could have cut off your head, basically, but I simply cut off your robe. And Saul realizes this is not the way this is not the way normal men act.

Your enemy, the man who's trying to kill you, and you can kill him just like that. Walk out with his head and say, men of Israel, I am now your king. And the army would have followed him.

This is how things are done, especially in the ancient world. This is how it was done over and over and over again, all over the Middle East, what is now Europe. These kinds of things happen constantly. He now has the chance to seize the throne. But David understood this wasn't an opportunity. God said certain things are going to happen, and God is very concerned with the methods by which we do that. The methods are very important to God. It makes perfect sense from a human viewpoint for him to take this opportunity, as his men told him, opportunity from God, kill him and all your problems are gone. But he knew what that would do to the land. He knew that's not what God wanted him to do. He knew he couldn't do that. God had made him king, and only God could unmake him as king. And he apologized. And it's interesting if we go down to verse 19.

For if a man finds his enemy, we let him get away safely. This is Saul speaking now to David. Therefore, may the Lord reward you with good for what you have done to me this day. And I know indeed that you shall surely be king, and the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand. He says, I know now God has selected you as king, because nobody else would have done this. Saul could have turned his 3,000 men on David and killed him right there. He's standing before the whole army, saying, I cannot kill you. God made you king.

Those aren't the methods of God. I can't do that.

And then he says something interesting. 21. Therefore, putting yourself into the Middle East at that time period, think about what this means. Therefore, swear now to me by the Lord that you will not cut off my descendants after me, and that you will not destroy my name from my father's house. Swear to me that you won't, when you're king, because I know now God's going to make you king. You won't hunt down all my sons and my grandchildren and my uncles, and you won't go kill everybody, because that's what you did. You destroyed the dynasty. He said, swear to me you won't kill all my family. And David says, so David swore to Saul that he wouldn't do that. David had never intended to kill his family, as we will see. So we find in this little snapshot something about David, and that is what others would think was an opportunity. He considered the methods and said, no, the methods aren't what God wants. A remarkable concept. A remarkable way he looks at things. What are the methods God wants? What are his laws concerning this? What are the ethics concerning this? Instead of just, oh good, I get a solution. You know, you think about, did the Bible school of people doing this? Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, they thought that was an opportunity. The Israelis and the Arabs are still fighting over that. All these many, many, many centuries later, they're still fighting over that bad decision of, well, look, an opportunity! Hagar rebelled it, bared the child. And I said, no, no, no. I said, Sarah would. Now you've created a real problem.

David here understood that. It wasn't an opportunity because it wasn't God's methods.

Now, Saul, of course, was killed by the Philistines.

And what happened was exactly what David must have feared all along. Some of Saul's descendants got together because Jonathan would have been king, but Jonathan was killed. And of course, Jonathan and David were best friends. And Jonathan had said, when dad's gone, you're the king. Jonathan totally, completely accepted him as king, even though that meant his dynasty would be gone. His children, his son would not be king. But Jonathan's dead. Saul's dead. And so the family of Saul gathers an army, and many of them are from all the different tribes of Israel except Judah.

Judah is firmly behind David. He's a Jew. He's one of them. And so you have a Jewish army that's commanded by Joab, who shows up in this story over and over again. Remember we went through, what was it, about six weeks ago? Two months ago, we went through Absalom?

Remember Joab in there who killed Absalom, even though David said not to? Joab is a thorn in David's side, but he's also probably the best general in the Middle East for a long, long, long time. So he kept him around until he died. And then he told Solomon, you hunt him down and kill him, because that man will stab you in the back.

So what we have here is a man who has a lot of problems, but he's a great general.

And so we have Joab leading David's army and Abner leading the army of Saul. They fight a number of small engagements, and hundreds of men are killed. And finally, Abner realizes that this descendant of Saul that they're making king really isn't a king. He doesn't have the wisdom of a king or the administrative abilities of a king. And he basically approaches David and he says, let's make peace. You know, if I lead the army over and we join armies, then he's just going to have to abdicate and we can stop all the bloodshed.

And David meets with Abner and says, you are truly an honorable man.

So they agree on this treaty. But Joab isn't there. Now Joab hates Abner because Abner killed Joab's brother in a battle, in one of these battles they were having. And so he hates him.

He hates him. And he finds out this treaty has been made and Joab goes off, sets up a meeting with Abner, gets him together as a friend. It says he actually puts his arm around him, then takes a knife and kills him.

Now David is confronted with an interesting problem. Well, let's go take the other tribes now. Their leader's killed. You know, I can go smash the house of Saul once and for all. I mean, once again, he has a great opportunity. And that's not what he does. Let's pick this up in 2 Samuel chapter 3. See, this snapshot tells us, his reaction here tells us something about him.

Verse 31. This is after David finds out what Joab's done.

He basically calls Joab a wicked man right in front of everybody.

Joab was a little bit afraid of David. So there was this weird relationship between David and Joab. Now men compared him.

Strychon, horrified, stricken with grief because this man was killed after they had made a treaty. And it wasn't him. And even Israel saw that. And after this, all the tribes started to give their allegiance to David. Because they realized he didn't trick Abner and kill him in cold blood. He loved the man. They had figured out a way to stop the war, which is what both of them wanted. In fact, probably Abner would have become an important person.

If you look at David's life, Abner probably would have become an important person in his government. An enemy general, because he was an Israelite and the war was over and they had made an agreement, and that's the kind of people they were. Not Joab. What we find here is that David refuses to be driven by envy and vengeance. He has a chance to destroy the house of Saul once again.

And he doesn't. Think of Saul, how envious he was of David. He killed priests of God because they gave David some bread. Killed them in cold blooded murder because they gave David some bread. Tried to kill his own son because he said, nope, he would not help hunt down David. He actually helped David escape from his dad.

Look at the difference between these two men and how they see life. So there's three little snapshots. Now what I want to do is some snapshots of his failures. Because we learn an awful lot about life as we learn from David here. And we learn from his failures as much as his successes. We see this attitude that he has. No vengeance. He has no need for jealousy. We see this big vision he has of God and what God is doing. And the covenant that God has made with his people and that he has faith in that and what God is doing.

And we see that he would not take opportunities, or what seemed to be opportunities, but the methods were wrong. And we're going to look here where he was faced with mistakes which actually were against some of these values he had. And how he had to deal with that. The first one I want to talk about is the Ark of the Covenant. Now I covered this once again.

We've been going through a lot of David over the last...well, since April of last year. We went through the Ark of the Covenant. And we talked about that when we talked about holiness. And what holiness is. And why the Sabbath is holy. And what it means to be holy people. And why marriage is holy. That these are very important things to God. And what holiness really is. And we talked about when the Ark of the Covenant was lost to the Philistines when they killed Saul and when they killed the priest.

And they killed Jonathan. And they took the Ark of the Covenant. But every place it went, it caused diseases on the people. So they said, this is Israel's God's box. So let's get rid of it. So they send it off.

And it goes back to Israel. They put it on a cart. And they take it to Israel. So David now is excited. The Ark of the Covenant is back. God has shown that He has accepted David as the king. He's showing all of Israel that He's back with them. And so He takes a beautiful new wagon and oxen.

And He puts the Ark of the Covenant on it. And they're taking it towards Jerusalem. And people are singing. And they are dancing. And they are praising God. And more and more people come up. There's this huge parade. Now understand, God was not upset with their dancing. Dancing was part of worship services then. God was not upset with their singing. Oh, they had tambourines and they had stringed instruments. They had a big parade going on.

They're singing. And God's not upset with their praise. God's not upset with these thousands and thousands of people who are going along laughing and joyously excited because God's with them again. That's not what He's upset over. He's upset because the oxen stumble and the Ark of the Covenant starts to fall and Uzzah reaches up to stop it. And God kills him. And they know it's from God. They know something supernatural. It's like a lightning bolt. I don't know. Something hits this man and it splits him open and he dies.

And they know this is from God. And you say, what's God's problem here? What's God's problem? David had forgotten something. I find David's reaction very interesting. Let's go to 1 Chronicles 13. Because David is at a crossroads here. David, maybe this is the closest he came. Well, there's two times here we're going to look at. That he came real close that he could have become just like Saul.

1 Chronicles 13. And let's look at verse 11.

How can you do this? All the people are gathered. All of Israel knows of this. All of Israel is excited. You are with us. Your ark of the covenant containing the Ten Commandments is on the way to Jerusalem. And you kill a man for trying to save it. Of course he's angry because he's thinking that way. And he says he's afraid. He just parks the ark and some guy's barn and says, leave it there. Nobody touched the thing. So for a long time, the ark is stuck in this guy's barn.

It says his family's blessed all the time. Nobody touches it. Nobody goes and looks at it. His family gets all kinds of blessings. And David is stewing on this. But what's interesting is where he could have gone. That anger could have turned into a belief and a feeling that God is unjust. That God is cruel. That you can't please God. He's a monster. He killed a good man. Or the fear. You could get to the place. Why even worship God? He's just going to hurt you anyways. But notice chapter 15, verse 1.

We went all through this when we went through one of those sermons. Remember we gave six sermons on holiness. David built houses for himself in the city of David, Zion, and prepared a place for the ark of God and pitched a tent for it. Oh yeah, it was supposed to have a dwelling place. It was supposed to be in a tent. It had been up to this point. Of course, Solomon's temple wasn't built yet. Then David said, no one may carry the ark of the covenant but the Levites. For the Lord has chosen them to carry the ark of the covenant and to minister before him forever.

And if you read all through this, he went to great trouble to say, what are the methods by which God wants us to do this? It wasn't an opportunity. He really misread this opportunity. The one with Saul, he realized, oh, can't kill him. This one, he got so excited, he really misread the opportunity.

God's methods are just as important as the destination. How God wants us to do something is real important. We can shoot for something that's God's will and do it in such a bad way, we never reach the destination. We never reach the point where we want to go or where we know what God wants. The methods, how we do it, everything in life is like this. We decide this is what God wants. Well, what are the methods to get there? What are the methods it takes to make that work?

Think about marriage. Have you ever met a couple that said, oh, yeah, we're getting married because we plan to fail? We're not like everybody else. We love each other so much. Why is there so much failure? It's the methods to the place where you're going, how you live life every day as part of that marriage that determines its end point.

So we try to apply methods that don't work, and we fail. Here he tried to do methods that didn't fail, but notice something about David and his failure. What did he do in all that anger? What did he do in all that fear? He went and said, what am I supposed to do here, God? And you know what? The Torah, he goes back to Leviticus, there's pages and pages of instructions on how this ark is to be handled.

And if you read all of chapter 15, that's what he did. And he went to the Levites and he said, you are supposed to do this, and you're supposed to do this, and you guys better get your act together because we're bringing the ark in. And you know, if you don't get your act together, he's not going to kill me, he's going to kill you. And they got their act together, and the next time they brought the ark in, thousands of people were dancing and singing and praising God, and God was happy.

Methods are so important to God. That's why motivations are so important to God. Because we can do actions, and our heart's not in it. David's heart was in everything he did. That's what made him so different than Saul. That's what made him so different. His heart was in everything he did. Now, I just want to talk briefly about the situation with Uriah and Bathsheba. We know that one when we went through a sermon on Psalm 51, which we did in the last year.

We see the depth of David's repentance. David always manned up. That's what I find amazing about him. He always came to the point, and he said, yes, you're right. In Psalm 51, he tells God, I am a criminal. The Hebrew words are fascinating, he uses. I am a criminal. I'm a murderer, and I'm an adulterer. Believe me, he didn't blame Bathsheba one bit. Remember, she didn't want to go along with it, because the Hebrew word there means it's not rape, but it's forced. In other words, she was protesting, but she submitted because he was the king.

What you have is a man who recognizes exactly what he's done. And unlike Saul, who justified himself, there is no justification. He doesn't say, but the people made me do it. Remember? Saul said, well, the people made me do it. Come on. I have to give in to the people. I'm a politician.

David said, it was my wives. None of them are a good wife. All five of them. You know what? Here's this young woman, beautiful young woman. What's she doing out in the middle of the night taking a bath on top of her roof? Well, you took a bath on the top of your roof because nobody could see you.

Except, of course, if you lived in the palace, you could look down on everybody's roofs. That's why. She wasn't some woman flaunting herself. She was doing it in a place where nobody could see her. Except him. There was nobody to blame this on. And he says, it's my fault. And then he begs God, please don't take your spirit away from me. He'd seen what happened to Saul. He knew what would happen.

He knew the insanity he would go into. And he says, please don't take your spirit away from me. He had nothing to bargain with. And he knew it. This is what makes him so amazing. I have no bargaining power here. He says, if you don't forgive me, I'm nothing. And I can't undo it. And then he says, if you do forgive me, this song is going to be sung throughout all of Israel.

In other words, I'm going to admit my sins to the entire nation. And then we'll all sing about it. How rotten David is, how great God is. And you know what we do? Look at your hymnal. We have Psalm 51 in the hymnal. What's funny is, I don't care if you're Jewish, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Mormon. They all have Psalm 51 in some form, and they're hymn books. Everybody sings about David's sins and God's greatness. Be careful what you promise God you're going to do.

You know, God, I'll sing about it. And 3,000 years later, millions of people are singing about it. But that's David. David wouldn't be offended by that. David would consider it an act of grace. He would consider it an act of grace from God. You understand grace, read Psalm 51. It's as powerful as anything in the New Testament.

He understood that before God, he had nothing. He was nothing. And that's what makes sense of 2 Samuel 12. 2 Samuel 12.

Because people are confused by this, that God is being cruel. David did not see it this way. Nathan come and said, and God is not going to kill you. I was going to kill your son. Oh my. David's probably thinking, kill me. Well, knowing David's character, he is saying, kill me. I'm the one who sinned. But understand, it was your sons who carried on the dynasty. Family was everything in kingship. Now this son wouldn't have been first in line. But also, he understands that this is God's punishment on him, so that the whole nation... Think about it. Think about it. The entire nation is the biggest scandal in the history of Israel. The king commits adultery and kills the woman's husband.

And now God is going to kill his son. Someday they are going to find a tablet, the National Enquirer of Jerusalem, from that time period. And the front page is going to be the king scandal. All the nations around would have heard of this, although they would have thought it was rather silly, because this is what all kings did. You took whatever woman you wanted and killed whoever you wanted. So what's the big problem? Only Israel would get upset over things like this.

And God says, everybody is going to know, David, because I'm going to tell everybody, I'm going to kill your son, and then I'm going to do it. Now, verse 16, 2 Samuel 12.

Seven days. Seven days he did not eat. Seven days he did not take a bath. It says, seven days...you know, you lose a lot of weight in seven days if you don't eat anything. He didn't take a bath. He didn't even change his clothes. David was haggard looking. He probably wandered the palace halls at night, praying to God, crying out to God for the life of the child.

And after seven days he's emaciated. He smells bad. He's filthy. This is where he is before God.

And the child dies. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead. For they said, indeed, while the child was alive, we spoke to him, and he would not heed our voice. How can we tell him that the child is dead? For he may do some harm. He may hurt himself. For yet he may hurt us. When David saw that his servants were whispering, David perceived that the child was dead. Therefore David said to his servants, is the child dead? And they said, yes, he is. So David arose from the ground, washed and anointed himself, changed his clothes, went into the house of the Lord, and worshiped God. He threw himself down before God and thanked God for the grace and the mercy he had shown to him. And he said, how could he even think this way? For one thing, he didn't kill all of his relatives. If you want to stop a dynasty, you kill everybody in the family. And God could have said, you're no longer fit for what you've done. So I'm going to kill everybody in your family. Then there will be no house of David left, and I can't have another war in Israel caused by your people trying to take over.

Well, just stop the dynasty right now. He accepted this punishment.

The most horrible punishment you could probably ever think of. He accepted this punishment as justice because God could have done a lot worse.

This is David. He has an understanding of who God is, and he has an understanding of who he is. This seems appalling to us today. Of course, if you understand the Second Resurrection, it's not appalling. The majority of people who have lived throughout history haven't had their opportunity for salvation yet. That happens in the Second Resurrection of Revelation at the end of Revelation 20. Then they received their opportunity for salvation. If he would have grown up and died, he would have still had no chance for salvation. So God looks at this differently than we do. We have to accept that, or we end up judging God. He did not judge God. They ask him, why are you eating now? Because he goes and gets something in it. He says, because while the child was alive, who would know what God would do? Because he's gracious. God is merciful. God is good. In other words, I'm the problem here, guys, not God. And as long as I asked, maybe he would show some mercy. But in the end, my sins caused this. He never blamed God.

This is a remarkable attitude. This is remarkable. He never blamed God for the punishment.

He just said, God's gracious here. What he could do would be a whole lot worse. One last snapshot. I may go a few minutes over, but not too much. I usually go over exactly an hour, and I've got six minutes left. So I may go an hour five. But I've got to get this last snapshot. Israel was at peace. David had finally stopped the wars. He'd brought the whole nation together. Things were good. Now remember, the greater ability you have from God, the greater things God does through you, the more Satan tries to get to you. And that's what's so interesting about the next one, because Satan is the origin of this next trial he goes through.

These other ones are just his failures. The next one, Satan actually tricks him into doing. Let's go to 1 Chronicles 21. 1 Chronicles 21.

David and Paul are two people of the Bible. I just have a lot of connection with. Verse 1, Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel. Well, somebody's going to take a census. Maybe it's so he can figure out how to distribute food, but no, no, no, no. The reason he is doing a census, he wants to know how many soldiers he has. And that would be the ages. I don't know what their age was, 16 to 35, whatever it is. He's got to know how many men he has in that age group that can fight, because Israel has become a superpower overnight. If you look at history at this time period, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, everybody's in sort of a low point of their history. And Israel now has a monarchy that's brought all the tribes together, and under David and Solomon, they become a superpower. And if you look at the amount of soldiers he had, how big is the American army today? 1.5 million? Something like that. His army was bigger than that. Not that he had 340 million people. It's because everybody, every man between this age and this age, you were a soldier. He had maybe the biggest army in the whole Middle East.

The reason he did this was because to see how much power he had. This is a dangerous place he's going.

He didn't ask God, how many men were with me when I faced Goliath? Now he's saying, how many men do I have? So David said to Joab and to the leaders of the people, go number Israel from Bathsheba to Dan, or Beersheba to Dan, and bring the number of them to me that I may know it. And Joab said, you know, Joab every once in a while was sort of smart. He was a great general. He was a great general. Joab answered, may the Lord make his people a hundred times more than they are, but my Lord, the King, are they not all my Lord's servants? Why then does my Lord require this thing? Why should he be a cause of guilt in Israel? In other words, you know God doesn't want us to number our army? God didn't even want him to have cavalry. He doesn't have cavalry and don't have chariots, because you'll trust in cavalry and chariots. Just trust in me. Just march out there and I'll save you.

David now has this huge army. If you read through it, you'll see. So now God is displaced with it. God knows exactly what's going on. So he sends Gad, a prophet, to David and he says, okay, what kind of punishment you want for this, David? It seems like the only way I can get to you is punish you. And David, realizing what he's done, that Satan has caused him to do this, says, I'll put myself into your hands. God says, okay. And God starts killing his soldiers. He starts killing his soldiers. He starts killing the people of Israel. And David, of course, is horrified. But David once again realizes it's not their fault and it's not God's fault. It's my fault. I am the king. And God holds me responsible for what happens to my people. Verse 16. Now this is a real dramatic scene here.

So David and the elders clothed and sackcloth fell on her faces and David said to God, was it not I who commanded the people to be numbered? I am the one who has sinned, the dead evil indeed. But these sheep, what have they done? Let your hand, I pray, O my Lord, be against me and my father's house, but not against your people that they should be plagued. That's very interesting. He realizes I must man up. I am the one responsible. And these people don't deserve this. Therefore take not only my life, but wipe out my dynasty. Kill everybody in my family. It's hard for us to imagine what that meant. But when you're a king, your dynasty was everything. Two and three and four or five generations of kings. This is the greatest thing you could ever achieve in the ancient world. It was a dynastic family ruling a nation. And he says, don't chill everyone in my family, but don't do this to these people. And God says, good, you understand. This is beyond anything Saul can imagine. It's not my fault. Saul kept saying, it's not my fault. And he tells him, okay, what I want you to do, verse 18, Therefore the angel of the Lord commanded Gad to say to David, that David should go and erect an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Oran the Jebusite. Zion. Once again, tying it into another sermon we've done this year. We talked about Zion and Jerusalem and Mount Moriah. We went through all that and the history and the prophecy about Zion. And so, Oran's out there with his sons working in the field, and he sees the angel of the Lord. All his sons run away. Oran being, you know, Jebusites were known as great, brave men, he just went back to work. And then David shows up, and David says, I have to sacrifice to God. And this is where he told me to come do it.

Verse 22. Then David said to Oran, Grant me the place of this threshing floor, that I may build an altar on it to the Lord. And you shall grant it to me at the full price, that the plague may be withdrawn from the people. But Oran said to David, Take it to yourself, let my Lord the King do what is good in his eyes. Look, I also give you the auction for burnt offerings, the threshing implements for wood, and the wheat for the grain offering. I give it all. He had another opportunity. Wow! How gracious is God! This would cost me a ton of money! And the guys give it all to me free! What an opportunity!

Verse 14. Then King David said to Oran, No, but I will surely buy it for the full price. I will not take what is yours for the Lord, nor offer burnt offerings, which have cost me nothing. So he gave him 600 shekels of gold. A huge amount of money back then. He said, No, I come before the great God. I cannot say I'm the king. I'll just take somebody else's gift to him. I have to bring my sacrifice. It has to come from me. It has to cost me something to bring this before the great God. See, we're back to his understanding of who God is. God stopped the plague. He stopped the plague. And what we see is a man who comes humbly before God and says, No, no, no, no, this isn't an opportunity. This isn't God's methods. God's methods are, this is between him and me. And for me to take something from somebody else is just a cheap way of trying to get to God.

You could spend the next three months studying Saul and David and not get everything out of it. Let me just quickly, I'm just quickly going to go through some of the things I started to write down that I've learned from this. Just some of them. Saul didn't recognize God's boundaries and took priestly duties upon himself. David refused to take upon himself what seemed to be an opportunity, but was not God's methods. It seemed to fix the problem, but it actually took him away from God in Saul's case. Saul was motivated by fear. David was motivated by God while working out in his time. His time, not David's time. Saul became controlled by public opinion and therefore refused to follow God's commands. David followed God's commands. When he didn't, he was punished and he responded with, I repent, show me your command. Saul's dependency on his own strength and abilities lead him to fail and confronted with something bigger than himself. David had a vision of God's great plan, of God's greatness as God, and God's plan for Israel, and that gave him the faith. Saul's preoccupation with himself filled him with envy and jealousy and revenge. David didn't show any need for vengeance, especially on the house of Saul, which would have been absolutely normal. And Saul had tried to kill him. His family kept trying to rise up and fight against him, and he never acted out of vengeance towards him. Here's the big one. Saul looked at Israel and Saul his kingdom. David looked at Israel and Saul God's kingdom. That's a huge difference. Saul saw his kingdom. David saw God's kingdom. Saul became totally controlled by his negative emotions. David constantly, whether it was anger or any, you know, the things that he would go through, his fear, he always was able to get control of those emotions.

Saul, of course, became driven by pride and arrogance. David showed this remarkable humility before God. He always knew before God he had nothing. It was what God did in him that mattered. Saul blamed others for his mistakes. David always manned up. And then David understood this personal need. When you bring a sacrifice before God, it only means something if you're sacrificing, if it cost you something. Because you're recognizing who God is. And it should cost you something to bring it before God. The lives of these two men is one of failure and one of success. Saul had everything going for him and he lost it all. David had everything going for him and fell down over and over and over again and got up and ended up being where God wanted him to be. He ended up being there. He ended up being the greatest king in the history of Israel, in spite of the fact that he failed numerous times. Because God, he kept going back and letting God work through him. The lessons of the lives of these two men apply to our lives. When you read this, don't just say, oh, this is sort of interesting history about Israel. When you read the lives and study the lives of Saul and David, it always leads you to do something. You study through this and you end up asking yourself, am I a Saul or am I a David?