I. The motive which set David to work in preparing for building the temple. This motive was thankfulness for a great mercy--God’s mercy in arresting the pestilence. God sends us deliverances from earthly calamities, not merely, not chiefly, that we may be delivered, but that our hearts may rise in thankfulness to Him. The soul gains more by the effort of thankfulness than the body has gained by deliverance from the physical mischief. The deliverance without the thankfulness is a sheer failure, baulking the providential purposes of God. Life would be brighter and stronger if each mercy were the occasion of a resolution to do some piece of good work for God.
II. The high estimate david had formed of what he had set himself to do: “Exceeding magnifical,” etc. He felt that a great effort was due, first of all to God Himself, as being what He is, and next, for the sake of those who did not know Him--the surrounding heathen peoples, who must not think meanly of what God’s servants thought to be due to His service. If anything is fatal to greatness in human endeavour, in act, in work, in character, it is a stunted estimate of what we have to do. The artist who has no ideal before him, or only a poor and meagre ideal, cannot hope to succeed. It is so with all forms of external enterprise. It is so with the formation of character. If we set out by saying that it is impossible to attain to anything great or noble, most certainly we never shall attain to it. We must make up our minds that the house of the Lord, whether it be material or spiritual, must be exceeding magnifical. No honest student of David’s Psalms can maintain that hewas ignorant of the true meaning of spiritual worship; or that he thought more of the things of sense than of the action of the soul in its approach to the Holy One; but his spirituality was not of that unwise kind which imperils the very existence of religion among men by doing away with all the outward symbols of its presence. Worship will not be the less spiritual when man has done his very uttermost in his poor way to express in outward and material structure his sense of the unapproachable magnificence of God.
III. The great distinction of David’s work of preparation for the temple is its unselfishness. One of the sternest lessons a man learns with advancing life is the disabling power of sin. Long after we have sincerely repented of sin it haunts us with its double legacy of a dimmed moral eyesight and of an enfeebled will; and even where these effects do not follow, as in David’s case they did not follow, sin remains with us as a memory which tells us when we would attempt something beyond the work of other men, something heroic, something sublime, something that belongs to the career of the saints, that, other matters apart, we are not the men to do it. The discovery that he would not be allowed to express his devotion in one supreme effort must have caused David a shock which we may not easily take measure of. But David did not think of the temple as having to be built either for his own glory or for Solomon’s glory, but for the glory of God. And so David prepared for it with all his heart.
IV. David’s preparation points to a great truth--the preciousness of work unrecognised by man. David does the work, Solomon is decorated with the reputation. Almost every discovery in science has been led up to by forgotten workers. The discoverer, who, after all, has only taken the last step in a long process, lives in history. A minister rises in his place in Parliament to make a statement which astonishes us by its familiarity with the details of a vast and intricate subject; but while the country is ringing with his praises the fact is that the knowledge which so astonishes England has been brought together by the patient toil of the permanent staff of the department, the toil of clerks whose names are, perhaps, unknown beyond their own families. Much more is this the case with the best work in the Church of Jesus Christ. (Canon Liddon.)
The inspiration of a lofty ideal
We expend our strength according to the ideals which it is our purpose to realise. The man who has not a high ideal of his work will be content with indifference, and with doing as little as possible. How profitable it would be if every young life could say at the beginning of its career, “My life is to be exceeding magnifical: it is to be a life of intelligence, purity, beneficence, holy activity in all blessed service: I will now make preparation for it.” What school-going we should then have! What attentive reading of initial books! What an eager sympathy with the purpose of every tutor! How little we should then make of difficulties! The work of preparation would be done under the consciousness that the temple was already built. (J. Parker,D. D.)
David and the temple
A fine and delicate sense of the becoming hindered David from building the temple. A voice within him had whispered, “No: however right and praiseworthy the idea, you are hardly the man to carry it out. Your hands are too stained with blood.” When the Divine word came, simply interdicting, it awoke in him at once a Divine perception of the reason and reasonableness of it; and the God-taught, God-chastened spirit within him made him see at once why the work of enshrining the ark, the ark of the holy and awful presence, must not he his.
I. Consider the remarkable self-restraint displayed by david. He who had lived much in camps and on the battlefield, whose will was law through the length and breadth of the land--he could stay himself from prosecuting his daring scheme with the thought of incongruity.
II. The self-restraint of David reveals the intense reality which god was tohim, as well as the impression which he had of the character of God. How pure and lofty would be his conception of the almighty Ruler when it struck him as altogether inappropriate and inconsistent that a shrine should be built for Him by one who had been engaged, however patriotically and for the interests of his country, in shedding much human blood.
1. The picture indicates that, although a man of war from hisyouth, David had never been proud of fighting. He had had dreams perhaps in his father’s fields of quite another sort of career for himself, and could see something far more attractive and desirable; it was not his ideal life; but it was what his lot had rendered inevitable for him and incumbent on him; it was what he had to do, and he did it.
2. Then, ones more, observe revealed here the remarkable preservation of David’s higher sensibilities. Neither the tumult and strife of years of warfare, nor the elation of successes gained by bow and spear, had prevailed to coarsen him, to render him gross and dull of soul. He emerges from it all, on the contrary, sensitive enough to answer readily to the whispered suggestions of seemliness, to be restrained and turned back upon the threshold of a coveted enterprise by a sense of the becoming.
3. Although precluded from doing what he had purposed and wished to do, he did not, as is the case with many, make that an excuse for doing nothing; did not, therefore, sulkily fold his hands, and decline to see what there was that he might do.
4. Then see how his true thought and noble aim survived him, and survived him to be ultimately realised. The temple grew and rose at last in all its wonderful splendour, though hewas not there to behold it. (S. A. Tipple.)
Working up to death
We should work up to the very moment of our death. Our last breath should, if possible, help some other man to pray better, or to work more, or suffer with a firmer constancy. Let no man suppose that the world stands still because he dies. God has always a temple to build, and He will always raise up the builders of it, and yet it pleases Him in His condescension to receive our assistance in preparation. (J. Parker,D. D.)
