Today we launch out on the 2nd of the OT’s leadership training books: 2 Samuel (or 2 Kings, that is, Leaders, as the Latin Bible calls it). And none of us should say `I’m not a leader, that’s not for me`!- a spiritual leader is simply someone who is one step ahead in some respect (maybe because they’ve done some preparation?!) of those they’re serving, and who serves them by helping them move that step forward. God will surely call each of us to do that in some way or other, now or in the future, as we grow.
But 2 Samuel isn’t always pretty. And its central character is David, a man whose leadership is marked both by huge success and huge disaster, both by wondrously doing the will of God and failing disastrously to do so.
Let’s recap what we know about him. David wasn’t a blue-eyed, curly-haired boy sweetly playing his harp. If we read our Bibles carefully we find he was a deeply damaged kid from a highly dysfunctional family. And seeing what God can do through someone like that can really encourage us…
He grew up in Bethlehem. Maybe not the greatest place to grow up: Judges’ end has a horrible story of a Bethlehem girl who gets gang raped and cut into pieces. (David’s great grandma Ruth came there as an immigrant: immigrants often don’t end up in the nicest places, at least to start with.) And what about the family he grew up in? When there’s a big celebration such that Samuel himself is coming, little brother David’s left out on the hills — where we know there are lions and bears. And look at how viciously he gets bad-mouthed by his oldest brother (1 Sam 17:28; see also Psalm 69:8).
I suspect this is why in his lament for Jonathan (2 Sam 1) David cries out, `I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.` This isn’t saying Jonathan and David were gay (hardly likely when David’s scriptures contained a death penalty for homosexual practice); but growing up in a family like David’s, he had simply never experienced the astonishingly generous affection that the crown prince Jonathan demonstrated in his willingness to share everything with his low-born friend, right up to and including Jonathan’s right to the throne (`You shall be king over Israel, and I will be second to you`, 1 Sam 23:17). But the wounds from David’s upbringing never entirely healed; scratch David when he’s drifted away from God and you can find an unreconstructed thug; a few posts ago we looked at his gross overreaction in 1 Sam 25:21-22, and soon we’ll watch what he does to Uriah. And there’s what he does, just before dying, to his old comrade Joab – maybe he’s senile then, but he’s clearly slipped back (as senile people can) into the vengeful mindset of his childhood. It’s important to recall that we are pre-Pentecost here; God the Spirit isn’t yet come in the way we know Him now, with His colossal power to interrupt the evil in us and transform us so it doesn’t just rebound from generation to generation. God the Spirit stops that now.
But 2 Samuel makes it clear how much David the leader had to learn. In ch6 he musters a whole army to bring God’s ark into God’s city, and abandons himself to worship – but has to learn the hard way that, in all this, he must worship the way God wants. Chs 11 and 12 show us how easily a leader (and we too) can fall, and why. Then the following chapters (13 to 20) show how David’s family’s dysfunctionality rebounded down the generations; how what his sons had learnt from their family background was disastrously released once David had lost the moral authority to discipline them. One of David’s sons rapes his half-sister, then his half-brother Absalom kills him. Absalom then goes after his dad David to kill him, rapes his concubines in public, and starts a civil war; during which he gets stabbed through the heart by Joab, David’s (possibly illegitimate) nephew. David’s not pleased about that, so he takes the army command from Joab, gives it to another nephew; the two meet in the road and one stabs the other. (The horrible realism of all this, rather than nice airbrushed legends, is one reason why we know it’s true. There is chaos sometimes even in the families of those on the right side; this is how things are, not how we’d like them to be.) And even Solomon, possessed of more wisdom than any man who ever lived – but, son of Bathsheba, who also was in no position to take the moral high ground with her son on sexual issues – was finally destroyed by a sex-drive way out of control: a man who collected an astonishing 700 wives and 300 concubines (sex partners), and they `led his heart astray’, with permanently disastrous effects on Israel…
Yes, it’s all too clear how damaged David was, and what the results of that were. He did wonderful things too; but the unavoidable consequences of his two main moral failures were catastrophic, for his family and, ultimately, the whole nation. Yet here’s the point: the wonder of the gospel is God quietly doing something glorious in all this. God works masterfully through human mess. (OM’s founder George Verwer, one of my all-time heroes, has distilled his lifelong experience of this into a life-saving book called Messiology; you can download it free – along with lots of other good stuff, like his brilliant Hunger for Reality – from georgeverwer.com.) God chose this man David. God doesn’t just choose well-adjusted kids from nice families. Nor does He just choose the naturally impressive, like Saul (1 Sam 10:24), or giant Goliath, or even David’s big brother Eliab (1 Sam 16:6). David was indeed gifted, but also damaged, from a horrible background, and that didn’t stop God. As 1 Cor 1:27 says, God deliberately chooses the weak things of the world, to His glory! God takes this damaged, gifted but mixed up kid and turns him into someone who built something massive for His glory, something no other Israelite king ever matched. David wrote half the book of Psalms; things that would last. (Like the wonderful `The Lord is my Shepherd` (Psalm 23). Do you love that psalm? It was quite possibly written while David was left out on the hills where the lions & bears were. `When my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up` (Psalm 27); he’d learned that too.) God uses people like this and sorts us out bit by bit; He chooses to use the weak, mixed-up things; He is brilliantly loving & creative. (Isn’t this great?) And His strength is made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor 12:9), and with us He builds His kingdom!
So as we move into 2 Samuel, what do we learn from all this? God chooses `real` people, damaged people, even dysfunctional people, and trains us and brings us into purposes glorious beyond our imagination. Let’s never underestimate what God can do with us. This is the great news of the gospel (let’s believe it, let’s share it!) The gospel teaches that if we invite God’s kingdom into our lives – God’s reign, God’s control; if we take His forgiveness for our sins, and give ourselves to Christ’s lordship; we will find God loves us unreservedly, no matter what. And then in the light of that we can be confident – can have faith – that He really plans to change us & do more with us than we can ever ask or think.
Let’s get a grip of this imaginatively; think, for another example, of that one kid whose loaves and fishes Jesus used to feed a whole 5000. God loves us, and if we’ll live for Him He can use us hugely and magnificently. Believe it: there is no limit to what His power can do through you!
