Psalm cxliii. 11, 12. Quicken me, O Lord, for thy name's sake: for
thy righteousness' sake bring my soul out of trouble. And of thy
mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them that afflict my
soul: for I am thy servant.
There are those who would say that I dealt unfairly last Sunday by
the Psalms of David; that in order to prove them inspired, I ignored
an element in them which is plainly uninspired, wrong, and
offensive; namely, the curses which he invokes upon his enemies. I
ignored it, they would say, because it was fatal to my theory!
because it proved David to have the vindictive passions of other
Easterns; to be speaking, not by the inspiration of God, but of his
own private likes and dislikes; to be at least a fanatic who thinks
that his cause must needs be God's cause, and who invokes the
lightnings of heaven on all who dare to differ from him. Others
would say that such words were excusable in David, living under the
Old Law; for it was said by them of old time, 'Thou shalt love thy
neighbour and hate thine enemy:' but that our Lord has formally
abrogated that permission; 'But I say unto you, Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you, and do good to those who despitefully use
you and persecute you.' How unnecessary, and how wrong then, they
would say, it is of the Church of England to retain these cursing
Psalms in her public worship, and put them into the mouths of her
congregations. Either they are merely painful, as well as
unnecessary to Christians; or if they mean anything, they excuse and
foster the habit too common among religious controversialists of
invoking the wrath of heaven on their opponents.
I argue with neither of the objectors. But the question is a
curious and an important one; and I am bound, I think, to examine it
in a sermon which, like the present, treats of David's chivalry.
What David meant by these curses can be best known from his own
actions. What certain persons have meant by them since is patent
enough from their actions. Mediaeval monks considered but too often
the enemies of their creed, of their ecclesiastical organisation,
even of their particular monastery, to be ipso facto enemies of God;
and applied to them the seeming curses of David's Psalms, with
fearful additions, of which David, to his honour, never dreamed.
'May they feel with Dathan and Abiram the damnation of Gehenna,'
{285} is a fair sample of the formulae which are found in the
writings of men who, while they called themselves the servants of
Jesus Christ our Lord, derived their notions of the next world
principally from the sixth book of Virgil's AEneid. And what they
meant by their words their acts shewed. Whenever they had the
power, they were but too apt to treat their supposed enemies in this
life, as they expected God to treat them in the next. The history
of the Inquisition on the continent, in America, and in the
Portuguese Indies--of the Marian persecutions in England--of the
Piedmontese massacres in the 17th century--are facts never to be
forgotten. Their horrors have been described in too authentic
documents; they remain for ever the most hideous pages in the
history of sinful human nature. Do we find a hint of any similar
conduct on the part of David? If not, it is surely probable that he
did not mean by his imprecations what the mediaeval clergy meant.
Certainly, whatsoever likeness there may have been in language, the
contrast in conduct is most striking. It is a special mark of
David's character, as special as his faith in God, that he never
avenges himself with his own hand. Twice he has Saul in his power:
once in the cave at Engedi, once at the camp at Hachilah, and both
times he refuses nobly to use his opportunity. He is his master,
the Lord's Anointed; and his person is sacred in the eyes of David
his servant--his knight, as he would have been called in the Middle
Age. The second time David's temptation is a terrible one. He has
softened Saul's wild heart by his courtesy and pathos when he
pleaded with him, after letting him escape from the cave; and he has
sworn to Saul that when he becomes king he will never cut off his
children, or destroy his name out of his father's home. Yet we find
Saul, immediately after, attacking him again out of mere caprice;
and once more falling into his hands. Abishai says--and who can
wonder?--'Let me smite him with the spear to the earth this once,
and I will not smite a second time.' What wonder? The man is not
to be trusted--truce with him is impossible; but David still keeps
his chivalry, in the true meaning of that word: 'Destroy him not,
for who can stretch forth his hand against the Lord's Anointed, and
be guiltless? As the Lord liveth, the Lord shall smite him, or his
day shall come to die; or he shall go down into battle, and perish.
But the Lord forbid that I should stretch forth my hand against the
Lord's Anointed.'
And if it be argued, that David regarded the person of a king as
legally sacred, there is a case more clear still, in which he
abjures the right of revenge upon a private person.
Nabal, in addition to his ingratitude, has insulted him with the
bitterest insult which could be offered to a free man in a slave-
holding country. He has hinted that David is neither more nor less
than a runaway slave. And David's heart is stirred by a terrible
and evil spirit. He dare not trust his men, even himself, with his
black thoughts. 'Gird on your swords,' is all that he can say
aloud. But he had said in his heart, 'God do so and more to the
enemies of David, if I leave a man alive by the morning light of all
that pertain to him.'
And yet at the first words of reason and of wisdom, urged doubtless
by the eloquence of a beautiful and noble woman, but no less by the
Spirit of God speaking through her, as all who call themselves
gentlemen should know already, his right spirit returns to him. The
chivalrous instinct of forgiveness and duty is roused once more; and
he cries, 'Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, which sent thee this
day to meet me; and blessed be thou, which hast kept me this day
from shedding blood, and from avenging myself with mine own hand.'
It is plain then, that David's notion of his duty to his enemies was
very different from that of the monks. But still they are
undeniably imprecations, the imprecations of a man smarting under
cruel injustice; who cannot, and in some cases must not avenge
himself, and who therefore calls on the just God to avenge him. Are
we therefore to say that these utterances of David are uninspired?
Not in the least: we are boldly to say that they are inspired, and
by the very Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of justice and of
judgment.
Doubtless there were, in after ages, far higher inspirations. The
Spirit of God was, and is gradually educating mankind, and
individuals among mankind, like David, upward from lower truths to
higher ones. That is the express assertion of our Lord and of his
Apostles. But the higher and later inspiration does not make the
lower and earlier false. It does not even always supersede it
altogether. Each is true; and, for the most part, each must remain,
and be respected, that they may complement each other.
Let us look at this question rationally and reverently, free from
all sentimental and immoral indulgence for sin and wrong.
The first instinct of man is the Lex Talionis. As you do to me--
says the savage--so I have a right to do to you. If you try to kill
me or mine, I have a right to kill you in return. Is this notion
uninspired? I should be sorry to say so. It is surely the first
form and the only possible first form of the sense of justice and
retribution. As a man sows so shall he reap. If a man does wrong
he deserves to be punished. No arguments will drive that great
divine law out of the human mind; for God has put it there.
After that inspiration comes a higher one. The man is taught to
say, I must not punish my enemy if I can avoid it. God must punish
him, either by the law of the land or by his providential judgments.
To this height David rises. In a seemingly lawless age and country,
under the most extreme temptation, he learns to say, 'Blessed be God
who hath kept me from avenging myself with my own hand.'
But still, it may be said, David calls down God's vengeance on his
enemies. He has not learnt to hate the sin and yet love the sinner.
Doubtless he has not: and it may have been right for his education,
and for the education of the human race through him, that he did
not. It may have been a good thing for him, as a future king; it
may be a good thing for many a man now, to learn the sinfulness of
sin, by feeling its effects in his own person; by writhing under
those miseries of body and soul, which wicked men can, and do
inflict on their fellow-creatures.
There are sins which a good man will not pity, but wage internecine
war against them; sins for which he is justified, if God have called
him thereto, to destroy the sinner in his sins. The traitor, the
tyrant, the ravisher, the robber, the extortioner, are not objects
of pity, but of punishment; and it may have been very good for David
to be taught by sharp personal experience, that those who robbed the
widow and put the fatherless to death, like the lawless lords of his
time; those like Saul, who smote the city of the priests for having
given David food--men and women, children and sucklings, oxen and
asses and sheep, with the edge of the sword; those who, like the
nameless traitor who so often rouses his indignation--his own
familiar friend who lifted up his heel against him--sought men's
lives under the guise of friendship: that such, I say, were persons
not to be tolerated upon the face of God's earth. We do not
tolerate them now. We punish them by law. We even destroy them
wholesale in war, without inquiring into their individual guilt or
innocence. David was taught, not by abstract meditation in his
study, but by bitter need and agony, not to tolerate them then. If
he could have destroyed them as we do now, it is not for us to say
that he would have been wrong. And what if he were indignant, and
what if he expressed that indignation? I have yet to discover that
indignation against wrong is aught but righteous, noble, and divine.
The flush of rage and scorn which rises, and ought to rise in every
honest heart, when we see a woman or a child ill-used, a poor man
wronged or crushed--What is that, but the inspiration of Almighty
God? What is that but the likeness of Christ? Woe to the man who
has lost that feeling! Woe to the man who can stand coolly by, and
see wrong done without a shock or a murmur, or even more, to the
very limits of the just laws of this land. He may think it a fine
thing so to do; a proof that he is an easy, prudent man of the
world, and not a meddlesome enthusiast. But all that it does prove
is: That the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of justice and
judgment, has departed from him.
I say the Spirit of God and the likeness of Christ. Instead of
believing David's own statement of the wrong doings of these men
about him, we may say cynically, and as it seems to me most
unfairly, 'Of course there were two sides to David's quarrels, as
there are to all such; and of course he took his own side; and
considered himself always in the right, and every one who differed
from him in the wrong;' and such a speech will sound sufficiently
worldly-wise to pass for philosophy with some critics; but,
unfortunately, he who says that of David, will be bound in all
fairness to say it of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For you must remember that there was a class of sinners in Judaea,
to whom our Lord speaks no word of pity or forgiveness: namely, the
very men who were his own personal enemies, who were persecuting
him, and going about to kill him; and that therefore, by any hard
words toward them, he must have laid himself open, just as much as
David laid himself open, to the imputation of personal spite. And
yet, what did he say to the scribes and Pharisees: 'Ye go about to
kill me, and therefore I am bound to say nothing harsh concerning
you'? What he did say was this: 'Ye serpents, ye generation of
vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?'
Yes; in the Son of David, as in David's self, there was, and is, and
will be for ever and ever, no weak, and really cruel indulgence; but
a burning fire of indignation against all hypocrisy, tyranny, lust,
cruelty, and every other sin by which men oppress, torment, deceive,
degrade their fellow-men; and still more, still more, remember that,
all young men, their fellow-women. That fire burns for ever--the
Divine fire of God; the fire not of hatred, but of love to mankind,
which will therefore punish, and if need be, exterminate all who
shall dare to make mankind the worse, whether in body or soul or
mind.
But David prays God to kill his enemies. No doubt he does.
Probably they deserved to be killed. He does not ask, you will
always remember, if you be worthy of the name of critical students
of the Bible--he does not ask, as did the mediaeval monks, that his
enemies should go to endless torments after they died. True or
false, that is a more modern notion--and if it be applied to the
Psalms, an interpolation--of which David knew nothing. He asks
simply that the men may die. Probably he knew his own business
best, and the men deserved to die; to be killed either by God or by
man, as do too many in all ages.
If we take the Bible as it stands (and we have no right to do
otherwise), these men were trying to kill David. He could not, and
upon a point of honour, would not kill them himself. But he
believed, and rightly, that God can punish the offender whom man
cannot touch, and that He will, and does punish them. And if he
calls on God to execute justice and judgment upon these men, he only
calls on God to do what God is doing continually on the face of the
whole earth. In fact, God does punish here, in this life. He does
not, as false preachers say, give over this life to impunity, and
this world to the devil, and only resume the reins of moral
government and the right of retribution when men die and go into the
next world. Here, in this life, he punishes sin; slowly, but
surely, God punishes. And if any of you doubt my words, you have
only to commit sin, and then see whether your sin will find you out.
The whole question turns on this, Are we to believe in a living God,
or are we not? If we are not, then David's words are of course
worse than nothing. If we are, I do not see why David was wrong in
calling on God to exercise that moral and providential government of
the world, which is the very note and definition of a living God.
But what right have we to use these words? My friends, if the
Church bids us use these words, she certainly does not bid us act
upon them. She keeps them, I believe most rightly, as a record of a
human experience, which happily seems to us special and extreme, of
which we, in a well-governed Christian land, know nothing, and shall
never know.
Special and extreme? Alas, alas! In too many countries, in too
many ages, it has been the common, the almost universal experience
of the many weak, enslaved, tortured, butchered at the wicked will
of the few strong.
There have been those in tens of thousands, there may be those again
who will have a right to cry to God, 'Of thy goodness slay mine
enemies, lest they slay, or worse than slay, both me and mine.'
There were thousands of English after the Norman Conquest; there
were thousands of Hindoos in Oude before its annexation; there are
thousands of negroes at this moment in their native land of Africa,
crushed and outraged by hereditary tyrants, who had and have a right
to appeal to God, as David appealed to him against the robber lords
of Palestine; a right to cry, 'Rid us, O God; if thou be a living
God, a God of justice and mercy, rid us not only of these men, but
of their children after them. This tyrant, stained with lust and
wine and blood; this robber chieftain who privily in his lurking
dens murders the innocent, and ravishes the poor when he getteth him
into his net; this slave-hunting king who kills the captives whom he
cannot sell; and whose children after him will inevitably imitate
his cruelties and his rapine and treacheries--deal with him and his
as they deserve. Set an ungodly man to be ruler over him; that he
may find out what we have been enduring from his ungodly rule. Let
his days be few, and another take his office. Let his children be
fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children beg their bread
out of desolate places. Let there be no man to pity him or take
compassion on his fatherless children--to take his part, and breed
up a fresh race of tyrants to our misery. Let the extortioner
consume all he hath, and the stranger spoil his labour--for what he
has is itself taken by extortion, and he has spoiled the labour of
thousands. Let his posterity be destroyed, and in the next
generation his name be clean put out. Let the wickedness of his
father and the sin of his mother be had in remembrance in the sight
of the Lord; that he may root out the memorial of them from the
earth, and enable law and justice, peace and freedom to take the
place of anarchy and tyranny and blood.'
That prayer was answered--if we are to believe the records of
Norman, not English, monks in England after the Conquest, by the
speedy extinction of the most guilty families among the Norman
conquerors. It is being answered, thank God, in Hindostan at this
moment. It will surely be answered in Africa in God's good time;
for the Lord reigneth, be the nations never so unquiet. And we, if
we will read such words rationally and humanly, remembering the
state of society in which they were written--a state of society,
alas! which has endured, and still endures over a vast portion of
the habitable globe; where might is right, and there is little or no
principle, save those of lust and greed and revenge--then instead of
wishing such words out of the Bible, we shall be glad to keep them
there, as testimonies to the moral government of the world by a God
and a Christ who will surely avenge the innocent blood; and as a
Gospel of comfort to suffering millions, when the news reaches them
at last, that they may call on God to deliver them from their
tormentors, and that he will hear their cry, and will help them.