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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 300. His Sinfulness
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His Sinfulness
2. The great sins of his life, his adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah, are perhaps but the common crimes of an Oriental despot; but, so far as we can judge, they were not common to Israel, and David as well as his subjects knew of a higher moral standard. It has been said, “But such sin is so unlike David's character.” Doubtless it was, on the theory that David was a character mingled of good and evil. But on David's own theory, that he was an utterly weak person without the help of God, the act is perfectly like David. It is David's self. It is what David would naturally do when he had left hold of God. Had he left hold of God in the wilderness he would have become a mere robber-chieftain. He does leave hold of God in his palace on Zion, and he becomes a mere Eastern despot.
It is not known very well how long David remained hardened and sullen after his great and double sin. At least he remained a certain number of months unawakened, it would seem, to the exceeding badness of his act. Perhaps no one in the kingdom knew quite the full details of the affair. Some may have known or surmised the part of the transaction that occurred in Jerusalem, and some may have known the part that occurred in the field with the army. But perhaps not many were able to connect the things together, or saw through the intrigue from beginning to end. And the king himself, drunk with illicit pleasures, seemed dead to every feeling of a nobler kind, whether of shame or of remorse. But proportionate to his hardening in sin was the softening and break-down that came on him when the prophet's words found their way to his heart. After a severe winter, the thaws of spring come with the greatest violence. When the earth is bound with an iron frost, and the streams are locked in ice, it is then, when the thaw wind sweeps over the fields, that the freshening is wildest, when the ice breaks in pieces, and the rivers roll like mountains to the sea. And when the quickening spirit breathed upon the king's heart, it broke, and dissolved into the wildest sorrow. The remorse or the repentance of a strong man is a thing worthy to be seen. If the man be very strong, he may remain master of himself, and, in the view of others at least, give no sign. But the repentance may be so strong as to master him; and then he will lie, as David here, convulsed and shaken like one in the grasp of a fit, uttering the sorest cries of sorrow, careless who is looking on, thinking only of Him against whom he has so grievously offended.1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, Waiting upon God, 56.]
3. Lastly, David's weakness in dealing with his own family is little to his credit. The imperious Joab was “too hard” for him; Amnon and Adonijah were indulged and spoiled, and even the outrageous conduct of the former met with no punishment; Absalom and Adonijah were allowed to declare their pretensions to the crown, while David neglected to take proper measures to determine the succession to the throne. But in justice to David it must be remembered that his family difficulties were in part the natural outcome of polygamy, and in part due to the state of culture of his time. His faults are the faults peculiar to a versatile genius: a lack of absolute truthfulness, a failure, in the face of sudden and powerful temptation, to control his passions, a selfish fondness for his children. Like many another man in the world's history, he developed rapidly and nobly in the face of hardship and opposition, and fell in the moment of prosperity and success. His life-history, therefore, is a tragedy because it failed to realize the promise of his earlier years.
“Moreover,” he continued, “it is much easier to love God perfectly in adversity than in prosperity. For tribulation having nothing in itself that is lovable, save that it is God's gift, it is much easier to go by it straight to the will of God, and to unite ourselves to His good pleasure. Easier, I say, than by prosperity, which has attractions of its own that captivate our senses, and, like Dalila, lull them to sleep, working in us a subtle change, so that we begin insensibly to love for its own sake the prosperity which God sends us, instead of bestowing all our grateful love on God who sends it, and to whom all thanks and praise are due.”1 [Note: J. P. Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, 141.]