Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 302. His Kingliness

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Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 302. His Kingliness


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IV



His Kingliness



But it is especially as a ruler that David left his mark on his own generation and on posterity. He set himself to free his country from its enemies, to secure it against invasion, and to make the people one. Jerusalem was virtually his creation; he strove to make it the religious and political centre of his kingdom; and the discontent of Judah bears witness to the zeal with which he laboured for the whole nation, and not only for his own tribe. His efforts were the more successful because with remarkable penetration he always knew the right measures to adopt. He won the Judæan elders by judicious presents, but he could wait at Hebron for Ishbosheth's fall; he thanked the men of Jabesh-gilead, disavowed all part in Abner's murder, retired from the first attack of Absalom, but kept up communication with the capital. In all the varied difficulties of his eventful life he was never without resource. Nor was he negligent of the administration of his kingdom. It is said that he “executed judgment and justice unto all his people”; and this statement is borne out by the readiness with which he listened to Nathan or the woman of Tekoa. Doubtless he once forced a census on an unwilling people, but except in one instance we never hear of his using his power for selfish ends. He was never fighting for his own hand, but always for the cause of God and the one people who held up the torch of truth; and in his vigour, and deep religious sense, amidst whatever faults, he endeavoured to set before him the welfare of his people, and the cause of God. He was in every sense David, the King. And the significance of his rule is that it clearly manifested the compatibility of a human hereditary monarchy with the idea of a Divinely ruled polity. In David the hopes of the nation were centred, as in one who had been chosen by God to fulfil and realize the theocratic sovereignty.



From the beginning to the end of his life, David remains the youth who, for his first encounter, dares to challenge Goliath, and at the same time the captain who, though ever victorious, is yet patient enough to await at Hebron the end of the reign of Saul, the death of his son, and the offer of the crown. General, diplomatist, poet, and administrator, he realizes the perfect type of the monarch-he is beyond doubt the greatest genius of the Biblical world. His accession had a flavour of the marvellous, and the reign which achieved the constitution of a state out of such hostile and independent elements as the tribes, and the discipline of a people so inclined to anarchy, impatient of restraint and always ready to revolt, was one long miracle. Such was David, without exalting his qualities or palliating his weaknesses. This is the unscrupulous brigand, the drunkard, the descendant of a courtesan, the thief, the bandit, the rogue, the assassin, depicted by certain schools because our religious traditions have given eternal sovereignty to his race. Had he but lived some centuries earlier among an idolatrous and fiction-loving people, he would not have been counted as an ancestor of a God-he himself would have been placed in the ranks of the Immortals.1 [Note: M. Dieulafoy, David the King, 266.]



David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: “A succession of falls”? Man can do no other. In this wild element of a life he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: that is the question of questions.1 [Note: Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship.]



Often, no doubt, the impulse was fleeting, and the broken purpose wasted in air. And often, too, the impulse was vague, and resulted in no definite action; yet not on that account, perhaps, to be cast aside as valueless. “I have a belief of my own,” says one of George Eliot's characters, “and it comforts me-That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are part of the Divine power against evil.”2 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 447.]