The woman's words are one of the few glimpses which we have of the
condition of religious thought amongst the masses of Israel. Clearly
she had laid to heart the teaching which declared the great, solemn,
universal fact of sin and consequent separation from God. For the
'banished ones' of whom she speaks are no particular class of glaring
criminals, but she includes within the designation the whole human
race, or, at all events, the whole Israel to which she and David
belonged. There may have been in her words--though that is very
doubtful--a reference to the old story of Cain after the murder of his
brother. For that narrative symbolises the consequences of all
evil-doing and evil-loving, in that he was cast out from the presence
of God, and went away into a 'land of wandering,' there to hide from
the face of the Father. On the one hand, it was banishment; on the
other hand, it was flight. So had Absalom's departure been, and so is
ours.
Strip away the metaphor, dear brethren, and it just comes to this
thought, which I seek to lay upon the hearts of all my hearers now--you
cannot be blessedly and peacefully near God, unless you are far away
from sin. If you take two polished plates of metal, and lay them
together, they will adhere. If you put half a dozen tiny grains of sand
or dust between them, they will fall apart. So our sins have come
between us and our God. They have not separated God from us, blessed be
His name! for His love, and His care, and His desire to bless, His
thought, and His knowledge, and His tenderness, all come to every soul
of man. But they have rent us apart from Him, in so far as they make us
unwilling to be near Him, incapable of receiving the truest nearness
and blessedness of His presence, and sometimes desirous to hustle Him
out of our thoughts, and, if we could, out of our world, rather than to
expatiate in the calm sunlight of His presence.
That banishment is self-inflicted. God spurns away no man, but men
spurn Him, and flee from Him. Many of us know what it is to pass whole
days, and weeks, and years, as practical Atheists. God is not in all
our thoughts.
And more than that, the miserable disgrace and solitude of a soul that
is godless in the world is what many of us like. The Prodigal Son
scraped all his goods together, and thought himself freed from a very
unwelcome bondage, and a fine independent youth, when he went away into
'the far country.' It was not quite so pleasant when provisions and
clothing fell short, and the swine's trough was the only table that was
spread before him. But yet there are many of us, I fear, who are
perfectly comfortable away from God, in so far as we can get away from
Him, and who never are aware of the degradation that lies in a soul's
having lowered itself to this, that it had rather not have God
inconveniently near.
Away down in the luxurious islands of the Southern Sea you will find
degraded Englishmen who have chosen rather to cast in their lot with
savages than to have to strain and work and grow. These poor
beach-combers of the Pacific, not happy in their degradation, but
wallowing in it, are no exaggerated pictures of the condition, in
reality, of thousands of us who dwell far from God, and far therefore
from righteousness and peace.