David, the shepherd boy, is watching his father’s sheep.
They are pasturing on the very hills where afterward a Lamb was born of
which you have heard much--“the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of
the world.”
David, the shepherd boy, was beautiful, brave, musical and poetic. I
think he often forgot the sheep in his reveries. There in the solitude he
struck the harp-string that is thrilling through all ages. David the boy
was at work gathering the material for David the poet and for David the
man.
Like other boys, David was fond of using his knife among the saplings,
and he had noticed the exuding of the juice of the tree; and when he
became a man he said: “The trees of the Lord are full of sap.”
David the boy, like other boys, had been fond of hunting the birds’
nests, and he had driven the old stork off the nest to find how many eggs
were under her; and when he became a man he said: “As for the stork, the
fir trees are her house.”
In boyhood he had heard the terrific thunder storm that frightened the
red deer into premature sickness; and when he became a man he said: “The
voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve.”
David the boy had lain upon his back, looking up at the stars and
examining the sky, and to his boyish imagination the sky seemed like a
piece of divine embroidery, the divine fingers working in the threads of
light and the beads of stars; and when he grew up he wrote:
“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers.”
When he became an old man, thinking of the goodness of God, he seemed
to hear again the bleating of his father’s sheep across many years, and
to think of the time when he tended them on the Bethlehem hills, and he
cries out: “The Lord is my shepherd.”
There is one scene in the life of David that you may not have pondered.
You have seen him with a harp, playing the devil out of Saul; with a
sling, smashing the skull of Goliath; with a sword, hacking to pieces the
Philistines; with a scepter, ruling a vast realm; with a psalm, gathering
all nations into doxology.
But now we have David playing the fool.
He has been anointed king, yet he is in exile and is passing incognito
among the Gathites. They are beginning to suspect who he is, and they say:
“I wonder if this is not the warrior, King David? It looks like him. Is
not this the man about whom they used to make poetry, and about whom they
composed a dance, so that the maidens of the city, reeling now on one
foot and now on the other, used to sing: ‘Saul has slain his thousands,
but David has slain his tens of thousands’? Yes, he is very much like
David; he must be David; he is David.”
David, to escape their hands, pretends to be demented; and he said within
himself:
“If I act crazily, then these people will not injure me. No one would be
so much of a coward as to assault a madman.”
So, one day, while these Gathites are watching King David with increased
suspicion, they see him standing by the door, running his hands
meaninglessly up and down the panels--scrabbling on the door as though he
would climb up, his mouth wide open, drooling like an infant.
I suppose the boys of the streets threw missiles at him, but the sober
people of the town said:
“This is not fair. Do you not see that he has lost his reason? Do not
touch this madman. Hands off! Hands off!”
So David escaped. But what an exhibition he made of himself before all
the ages!
There was a majesty in King Lear’s madness after Regan and Goneril, his
daughters, had persuaded him to banish their sister, Cordelia, and all
the friends of the drama have been thrilled with that spectacle.
The craziness of Meg Merrilies was weird and imposing, and formed the
most telling passage in Sir Walter Scott’s “Guy Mannering.”
There was a fascination about the insanity of Alexander Cruden, who
made the best concordance of the Bible that the world ever saw--made it
between the mad houses.
But there was nothing grand, nothing weird, nothing majestic, nothing
sublime about this simulation on the part of David. Instead of trusting
in the Lord, as he had trusted on other occasions, he gathers before
him a vast audience of all generations that were to come, and, standing
on that conspicuous stage of history, in view of all the ages, he
impersonates the slavering idiot.
Taking the behavior of David as a suggestion, I wish to show you how
many of the wise, the brave and the regal sometimes play the fool. Those
men as badly play the fool as did David who, in any crisis of life, take
their case out of the hand of God.
David, in this case, acted as though there were no God to lift him out of
the predicament. What a contrast between his behavior, when this brave
little man stood up in front of the giant ten feet in height, looking
into his face, and this time, when he debased himself and bedraggled his
manhood by affecting insanity in order that he might escape from the grip
of the Gathites! In the one case, he played the hero; in the other case,
he played the fool.
There came a time when David fled from his pursuers. The world runs very
fast when it is chasing a good man. The country is trying to catch David,
and to slay him. David goes into the house of a priest, and asks him for
a sword or spear with which to defend himself.
The priest, not being accustomed to use deadly weapons, tells David
that he can not supply him; but suddenly the priest thinks of an old
sword that had been carefully wrapped up and laid away--the very sword
that Goliath formerly used. He takes down that sword, and while he is
unwrapping the sharp, glittering and memorable blade it flashes upon
David’s mind that this is the very sword that was used against himself
when he was in the fight with Goliath, and David can hardly keep his hand
off it until the priest has unwound it.
David stretches out his hand toward that old sword, and says: “There is
none like it; give it me.” In other words: “I want in my own hand the
sword that has been used against me, and against the cause of the Lord.”
So it was given him.
Here passes through these streets, as in imagination I see him, a
wonderful man. Can it be that I am in the very city where lived and
reigned David--conqueror, king and poet? David--great for power and great
for grief!
He was wrapped up in his boy, Absalom, who was a splendid boy, judged by
the rules of worldly criticism. From the crown of his head to the sole of
his foot there was not a single blemish. The Bible says that he had such
a luxuriant shock of hair that, when once a year it was shorn, what was
cut off weighed over three pounds.
But, notwithstanding all his brilliancy of appearance, he was a bad
boy, and broke his father’s heart. He was plotting to get the throne of
Israel. He had marshaled an army to overthrow his father’s government.
The day of battle had come; the conflict was begun. David, the father,
sat between the gates of the palace, waiting for tidings of the conflict.
Oh, how rapidly his heart beat with emotion! Two great questions were to
be decided--the safety of his boy and the continuance of the throne of
Israel.
After a while a servant, standing on the top of the house, looks off,
and he sees some one running. He is coming with great speed, and the man
on top of the house announces the coming of the messenger.
David watches and waits, and as soon as the messenger from the field
of battle comes within hailing distance the father cries out. Is it a
question in regard to the establishment of his throne? Does he say: “Have
the armies of Israel been victorious? Am I to continue in my imperial
authority? Have I overthrown my enemies?” Oh, no.
There is one question that springs from his heart to his lip, and springs
from the lip into the ear of the besweated and bedusted messenger flying
from the battle field--the question:
“Is the young man--Absalom--safe?”
When it was told to King David that, although his army had been
victorious, his son had been slain, the father turned his back upon the
congratulations of the nation, and went up the stairs of his palace, his
heart breaking as he went, wringing his hands sometimes, and then again
pressing them against his temples, as though he would press them in,
crying:
“O Absalom! My son! My son! Would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom!
My son! My son!”
* * * * *
Stupendous grief of David, resounding through all succeeding ages!