2 Samuel 19:1-15

The facts are:

1 . In consequence of David's sorrowful isolation, the people mourn and betake themselves to the city ashamed and discouraged.

2 . Joab, being informed of the fact, enters the king's house, and sharply rebukes him for his conduct, charging him with disregarding the sacrifices his people had made, and caring more for his rebellious son than for his attached friends.

3 . Joab then advises him at once to arise and go forth to encourage the people, pointing out that otherwise the greatest trial of his life will be sure to come in the alienation of his subjects.

4 . The king thereupon sits in the gate of the city, and all the people come to him.

5 . Meanwhile, during David's sojourn at Mahanaim, the people of Israel are at variance as to the course to be pursued with reference to brining him back to rule over them, and it is urged that, under all the circumstances of the case, something should be done in that direction.

6 . David, hearing of the intentions of Israel, sends to Zadok and Abiathar to suggest to the elders of Judah the impropriety of their being forestalled in the movement by their brethren of Israel.

7 . He also instructs them to inform Amasa of his purpose to displace Joab in his favour.

8 . The heart of the people of Judah being entirely won, they send unto him a message that he should return, and the king acting upon it, they meet him at Gilgal to conduct him over Jordan.

Solitariness in religious experience.

The isolation of David from his people during this absorption in what appeared to be a domestic sorrow caused pain to his staunchest friends, was very near imperilling his influence as sovereign, and gave some ostensible ground for the ungracious remonstrance of Joab. But the fact is, David was true to himself as a man of deepest piety, and the people were unable to enter into the actual struggle through which he was passing. Like One greater, he "trod the wine press alone." It was not mere natural affection for a son, it was not pain that a son had been ungrateful, that crushed him and rendered him for the time forgetful of the claims of his people and the duties of his office. The key to the whole is to be sought in the prediction of Nathan ( 2 Samuel 12:9-12 ), the fulfilment of this in its severest form in the tragedy of the life just ended, and the keen perception of this in relation to his own dreadful sin. His distinct recognition of the chastising hand of God ( 2 Samuel 15:24-30 ) when, with bare feet and broken heart, he passed in silence and tears over Mount Olivet, was now repeated with, of course, the fuller and more overwhelming anguish attendant on the ruin of a life, yea, of a soul, as he felt, through his own great sin. Joab and the people never, perhaps, knew of Nathan's declaration. It was always a latent element in David's restored life of piety; but now it was the crushing force before which he could not hold up. He saw, as he believed, how his spiritual degeneracy, during those dark months of horrible sin and guilt, had acted perniciously on the spirit of his son; and he could not but feel that, in the temporal and spiritual destruction of his son, he was now reaping just what he had sown. Yet all this he had to bear alone! No one could share the dreadful secret; and in proportion as he saw what was involved in a ruined soul, so would be the utterness of his anguish. No wonder if in his solitary experience he forgot all earthly things, and gave himself up to the bitterness of his grief.

I. THERE ARE CRISES IN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE . David was a man of many crises. The history and the Psalms reveal them. His call to kingship by Samuel meant an unrecorded experience of a most extraordinary kind. His anguish in exile when pursued by Saul put his faith to a terrible test. His sad fall was a descent into a pit of horrors. The tremendous conflict involved in his restoration is indicated in the fifty-first psalm, and now, when the judgment of God for his sin falls in heaviest form, he descends into the depths ( Psalms 130:1-8 .) further, perhaps, than was ever known by any other man. We see similar crises in the lives of some others. Jacob knew the desolation of Bethel and the pains of the wrestling with the angel. Paul was dumb and blind before God till prayer brought him forth to light and peace; and he later on had experiences of things which it was "not lawful" to utter. Most men whose religion has depths have known times when anguish before God has shut out all thought and care of earthly things. Some have seasons of temptation equal to that of Bunyan's Pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. As a rule, religious life is a steady growth, but there are checks and disasters when the question of life itself is at stake. We can understand David's experience in the case before us without having recourse to the hypothesis of a weak mind overborne by natural sorrow for the death of a favourite son.

II. CRISES IN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE ARE OFTEN MOST ABSORBING . David was so absorbed in the spiritual anguish springing from a religious view of the ruin of Absalom in connection with his own great sin, as practically to forget that he was a king, and that a nation needed his guidance. The narrative is true to the spiritual facts that may be traced by a comparison of this event with the king's previous conduct. The intensity of his nature, as revealed in the strong and passionate utterances of the psalms, whether in joy or sorrow, would add to the tendency to yield himself utterly to this greatest of all the calamities consequent on his sin. The passion with which he once pleaded for Bathsheba's child ( 2 Samuel 12:16-20 ) was an instance of the same kind, only less than this, because here the trouble was the more serious in so far as the moral and bodily ruin of a son was a greater consequence of his sin. All who have entered into the solitariness of the great crises in the soul's career know how at such times all earthly things seem to vanish into insignificance; and it is with extreme difficulty that ordinary and necessary duties can be attended to. Men have been known to forget to take food, and to isolate themselves from their friends. And no wonder, when the soul sees its sins in the awful light of God's judgments, or is made to feel the consequences to others of its past deeds. Peter did not associate freely with friends that night on which he "went out and wept bitterly."

III. THERE ARE QUALIFYING CIRCUMSTANCES THAT DETERMINE THE DEGREE OF ABSORPTION IN THE SORROWS OF A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE . David never felt anything like this. But the reason is plain. Never before did he see a connection between his own past conduct and so awful an event. The special elements contributing to his self-absorbing misery were a vivid remembrance of his dreadful sin in the case of Bathsheba and Uriah; a spiritual appreciation of the awful issue of his son's life; a deep conviction that that issue was, in the judgment of God, in some way connected with his own sin; a contrast, inevitable in the association of ideas, of the end of Absalom with the hopes once cherished concerning him; a reflection, which could not but occasionally force itself in ( 2 Samuel 12:13 ), that he only was forgiven and saved; a feeling that no one on earth could enter into his sorrows and afford him consolation. All these circumstances gained force by the fact that constitutionally he always felt strongly, and religiously his superior spiritual discernment rendered sin and its effects the more terrible. So in our own experience there will be, perhaps, specialities which may render our absorption much more absolute than is that of others. The natural mental and moral texture of our nature, the conditions under which our sins were committed, the consequences which we can trace from our former sins, the vividness with which an ideal past is contrasted with present facts, the relative clearness of our spiritual perceptions and tenderness of our susceptibilities, and degree of homage paid to the majesty of God's holy Law,—all these may qualify the self-surrender to the experience of the time. We cannot expect cold and stolid men to bear the same troubles in the same way as do men of quick and highly developed spiritual sensibilities.

IV. THE SORROWS OF SUCH CRISES CANNOT BE SHARED . A community of experience is necessary to the creation of a sympathy coextensive with the depth of the sorrow. There were parents in Israel and Judah who had lost sons, and they would be able to enter into David's grief to that extent, and he could so far speak to them of his trouble. There were sinful men at Mahanaim who knew what trouble of conscience was, and who might afford comfort to their neighbours when mourning over their guilt; but there was no man in all the world who had sinned as David had, and no one in the world, perhaps, who now saw what an unutterably awful thing sin in general was, and especially his sin. To no one except Nathan, who probably kept aloof from him, had the connection of David's sin with this judgment on it been known. Consequently, David felt shut up to his own anguish. "Of the people there was none with him." The transaction was between himself and God. He knew that the people did not understand him, and he could not explain himself to them. So is it with all our deepest experiences before God. We see our sins set in the light of his countenance, and no one can share the experience involved therein. Reversing the picture, it may be said that there are also seasons of blessedness in the course of life when the "joy is unspeakable and full of glory," and which can never be fully told or even understood.

GENERAL LESSONS .

1 . Let us remember that there are daily some persons passing through fearful crises in their religious life, and that it is possible to help all such by our prayers.

2 . We should be very considerate of others who may appear to be unduly cast down, as there may be circumstances which, if known, would strengthen our pity.

3 . It is very possible for us to misjudge others in the conduct they adopt, and make our own contracted experience a standard of judgment.

4 . We may expect that those who are utterly broken down in spirit will be called out of their self-absorption by the voice of Providence.

5 . It is a comfort to us all to know that God understands our real thoughts and feelings, and that we have a High Priest who is touched with a feeling of our infirmities, he having entered into deeper depths of sorrow than we can ever know.

The remoter consequences of sin.

The narrative sets forth the action of Joab to arouse the king from his self-absorption, and the changed attitude of the people towards him, as also the measures taken by David to bring about a reconciliation between himself and the entire nation. The great judgment on David's sin was now passed. Nathan's words had been fearfully fulfilled, but in what followed we see also some of the remoter consequences of the sin. Thus Joab's rough treatment and unbecoming familiarity in the discharge of an honest duty were connected with the fact that David had put himself in Joab's power by making him privy and accessory to the death of Uriah. The people were now almost alienated because of the absorption of the king in sorrow. which would not have happened but for the sin which created the sorrow. The question of the precedence of Judah in the matter of his restoration was the distinct formulation of a jealousy and sectional interest which subsequently resulted in a schism of the kingdom, and this question would not have arisen but for the chastisement for sin in the form of a son's rebellion. Likewise the ultimate death of Amasa came through David's having, probably because Joab bad been insulting and because a complete amnesty was deemed desirable, displaced Joab in his favour. These bitter streams all flowed into the remoter ramifications of life from the fountain of trouble opened by the fall of David. Hereon we may observe—

I. THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN MAY COEXIST WITH THE ONWARD FLOW OF SOME OF ITS CONSEQUENCES . There is a certainty that David's great guilt was covered ( 2 Samuel 12:13 ). The prayer of the fifty-first psalm had been fully answered, and privately he had been able to rejoice again in the God of his salvation. But we have in this history the spectacle of a pardoned, reconciled man, confident in his personal salvation, and the onward flow of a stream of social and material evils which, so far at least as they were related to him, sprang from his sin. The prediction of Nathan did not establish an arbitrary relation between his conduct to Bathsheba and Uriah, and the whole mental and moral condition implied therein, and the rebellion of Absalom and the perplexities of the situation after its suppression. There was an organic connection between the spiritual fall and the civil troubles. The spiritual element in us is the centre of our composite nature. A change for the worse in it radiates through the entire being, and as the outward relations are affected by the condition and direction taken by our various powers, so the inmost change is the spring of manifold and ever-flowing consequences. The deteriorated influence on others, consequent on a period of spiritual declension, cannot but act dynamically as a wave long after we have by repentance and faith been restored to God. The personal condemnation is gone, but the injury done on society is not gone. The intricate mass of material and social evils now afflicting the world is the outcome of deviation from the perfect will of God, and though some who thus deviated are now blessed in heaven, the quota they contributed by their former sins is still somewhere in the tangled mass.

II. SIN IS A DISTURBER OF MANY RELATIONS . David's sin affected his relation to God and to his own family and people. It touched his personal influence among friends, his administration, and indirectly, through the rebellion, the lives and dearest interests of multitudes. The distress and uncertainty at Mahanaim after the defeat of Absalom and the hesitancy of the tribes to welcome him back, were traceable to what he had formerly done. Who can describe the manifold disturbances in the order of things produced in our world by the sin of Adam? The ramifications of the wave of disturbance created by any one sin are more than can be numbered. It is in the more conspicuous acts of transgression that we get visible traces of a widespread disturbance similar to what is caused by every inconspicuous act. A rebellious son in a home, a dishonest deed in business, a vicious habit,—these reveal a manifest series of troubles in private, social, and public connections. No sinner sins to himself. Moral evil gives colour and form to all things. It infuses an element of defect, if not of positive evil, into every bodily, mental, and moral relation sustained by the sinning man.

III. THE DISTURBANCE CAUSED BY SIN FLOWS ON INTO THE REMOTE FUTURE . The great moral shock involved in David's great sin produced effects which for years flowed on , and which, in fact, are flowing on now. The great storm in mid-ocean sends the under swell into far distant bays, and long after quietude has been restored at the centre the sullen roll falls on the beach. The whole subsequent course of Hebrew history was modified by the deed of evil done in secret. In so far as the power of David over the world is less, and different in kind, from what it would have undoubtedly been had he kept himself pure, so far his sin is still at work shaping the destinies of men. We can never call back the waves of pernicious influence we send forth in a single sinful act or feeling. It is the law of the universe that they go on. The supposed counteraction of them by subsequent repentance and amendment only means that we modify the influence previously sent forth,—we make the world somewhat better than it would have been had the sinful influence gone out alone. We cannot annihilate it any more than we can annihilate force. The future is the sum of all the influences of the past.

IV. THE MANIFOLD AND EVER - FLOWING CONSEQUENCES OF SIN ARE NOT ADEQUATELY RECOGNIZED BY MANKIND . David recognized the rebellion and death of Absalom and the associated civil inconveniences as being in some way connected with his sin; but even he did not see, when at Mahanaim, that the subsequent death of Amasa and the schism of the two kingdoms were also a consequence of his conduct, and therefore of his sin. His own people probably did not even connect the troubles of the times with his sin, but rather with what they regarded as a foolish over fondness for a favourite son. In our life we do not sufficiently connect our bodily and mental imperfections with the sins of others in the past, or, in some cases, especially with our own sins. Political bodies and publicists fail to recognize the spiritual origin of vast and complicated social troubles. The Bible in this respect is the most statesmanlike and philosophical of all books, in that it gives prominence to sin as the determining factor in all our material and social troubles. A spiritual mind discerns the spiritual causes.