Sermons on National Subjects

So with the church of Christian men.  After the apostles’ time, and even during the apostles’ time, as we read from the Epistle to the Galatians, they fell away, step by step, from the liberty of the gospel, till they sunk entirely into popish superstition.  And yet God brought good out of that evil.  He made that very popery a means of bringing them back at the Reformation into clearer light than any of the first Christians ever had had.  He is going on step by step still, bringing Christians into a clearer knowledge of the gospel than even the Reformers had.

And so with the Jews.  They fell from their liberty and chose a king.  And yet God made use of those kings of theirs, of David, of Solomon, of Josiah, and Hezekiah, to teach them more and more about Himself and His law, and to teach all nations, by their example, what a nation should be, and how He deals with one.

But now let us see what this true king, David, was like, whom God chose, that He might raise, by his means, the Jews higher than they ever yet had been, even in their days of freedom.  Now remark, in the first place, that David was not the son of any very great man.  His father seems to have been only a yeoman.  He was not bred up in courts.  We find that when Samuel was sent to anoint David king, he was out keeping his father’s sheep in the field.  And though, no doubt, he had shown signs of being a very remarkable youth from the first, yet his father thought so little of him, that he was going to pass him over, and caused all his seven elder sons to pass before Samuel for his choice first, though there seems to have been nothing particular in them, except that some of them were fine men and brave soldiers.  So David seems to have been overlooked, and thought but little of in his youth—and a very good thing for him.  It is a good thing for a young man to bear the yoke in his youth, that he may be kept humble and low; that he may learn to trust in God, and not in his own wit.  And even when Samuel anointed David, he anointed him privately.  His brothers did not know what a great honour was in store for him; for we find, in the lesson which we have just read, that when David came down to the camp, his elder brother spoke contemptuously to him, and treated him as a child.  “I know thy pride,” he said, “and the naughtiness of thy heart.  Thou art come down to see the battle.”  While David answers humbly enough: “What have I done? is there not a cause?” feeling that there was more in him than his brother gave him credit for; though he dare not tell his brother, hardly, perhaps, dare believe himself, what great things God had prepared for him.  So it is yet—a prophet has no honour in his own country.  How many a noble-hearted man there is, who is looked down upon by those round him!  How many a one is despised for a dreamer, or for a Methodist, by shallow worldly people, who in God’s sight is of very great price!  But God sees not as man sees.  He makes use of the weak people of this world to confound the strong.  He sends about His errands not many noble, not many mighty; but the poor man, rich in faith, like David.  He puts down the mighty from their seat, and exalts the humble and meek.  He takes the beggar from the dunghill, that He may set him among the princes of His people.  So He has been doing in all ages.  So He will do even now, in some measure, with everyone like David, let him be as low as he will in the opinion of this foolish world, who yet puts his trust utterly in God, and goes about all his work, as David did, in the name of the Lord of hosts.  Oh! if a poor man feels that God has given him wit and wisdom—feels in him the desire to rise and better himself in life, let him be sure that the only way to rise is David’s plan—to keep humble and quiet till God shall lift him up, trusting in God’s righteousness and love to raise him, and deliver him, and put him in that station, be it high or low, in which he will be best able to do God’s work, or serve God’s glory.

And now for the chapter from which the text is taken, which relates to us David’s first great public triumph—his victory over Goliath the giant.  I will not repeat it to you, because everyone here who has ears to hear or a heart to feel ought to have been struck with every word in that glorious story.  All I will try to do is, to show you how the working of God’s Spirit comes out in David in every action of his on that glorious day.  We saw just now David’s humbleness and gentleness, the fruits of God’s Spirit in him, in his answer to his proud and harsh brother.  Look next at David’s spirit of trust in God, which, indeed, is the key to his whole life; that is the reason why he was the man after God’s own heart—not for any virtues of his own, but for his unshaken continual faith in God.  David saw in an instant why the Israelites were so afraid of the giant; because they had no faith in God.  They forgot that they were the armies of the living God.  David did not: “Who is this uncircumcised, that he shall defy the armies of the living God?”  And therefore, when Saul tried to dissuade him from attacking the Philistine, his answer is still the same—full of faith in God.  He knew well enough what a fearful undertaking it was to fight with this giant, nearly ten feet high, armed from head to foot with mail, which perhaps no sword or spear which he could use could pierce.  It was no wonder, humanly speaking, that all the Jews fled from him—that his being there stopped the whole battle.  In these days, fifty such men would make no difference in a battle; bullets and cannon-shot would mow down them like other men: but in those old times, before firearms were invented, when all battles were hand-to-hand fights, and depended so much on each man’s strength and courage, that one champion would often decide the victory for a whole army, the amount of courage which was required in David is past our understanding; at least we may say, David would not have had it but for his trust in God, but for his feeling that he was on God’s side, and Goliath on the devil’s side, unjustly invading his country in self-conceit, and cruelty, and lawlessness.  Therefore he tells Saul of his victory over the lion and the bear.  You see again, here, the Spirit of God showing in his modesty.  He does not boast or talk of his strength and courage in killing the lion and the bear; for he knew that that strength and courage came from God, not from himself; therefore he says that the Lord delivered him from them.  He knew that he had been only doing his duty in facing them when they attacked his father’s sheep, and that it was God’s mercy which had protected him in doing his duty.  He felt now, that if no one else would face this brutal giant, it was his duty, poor, simple, weak youth as he was, and therefore he trusted in God to bring him safe through this danger also.  But look again how the Spirit of God shows in his prudence.  He would not use Saul’s armour, good as it might be, because he was not accustomed to it.  He would use his own experience, and fight with the weapons to which he had been accustomed—a sling and stone.  You see he was none of those presumptuous and fanatical dreamers who tempt God by fancying that He is to go out of His way to work miracles for them.  He used all the proper and prudent means to kill the giant, and trusted to God to bless them.  If he had been presumptuous, he might have taken the first stone that came to hand, or taken only one, or taken none at all, and expected the giant to fall down dead by a miracle.  But no; he chooses five smooth stones out of the brook.  He tried to get the best that he could, and have more ready if his first shot failed.  He showed no distrust of God in that; for he trusted in God to keep him cool, and steady, and courageous in the fight, and that, he knew, God alone could do.  The only place, perhaps, where he could strike Goliath to hurt him was on the face, because every other part of him was covered in metal armour.  And he knew that, in such danger as he was, God’s Spirit only could keep his eye clear and his hand steady for such a desperate chance as hitting that one place.

So he went; and as he went his courage rose higher and higher; for unto him that hath shall more be given; and so he began to boast too—but not of himself, like the giant.  He boasted of the living God, who was with him.  He ran boldly up to the Philistine, and at the first throw, struck on the forehead, and felled him dead.

So it is; many a time the very blessing which we expect to get only with great difficulty, God gives us at our first trial, to show that He is the Giver, to cheer up our poor doubting hearts, and show us that He is able, and willing too, to give exceeding abundantly more than we can ask or think.

So David triumphed: and yet that triumph was only the beginning of his troubles.  Sad and weary years had he to struggle on before he gained the kingdom which God had promised him.  So it is often with God’s elect.  He gives them blessings at first, to show them that He is really with them; and then He lets them be evil-entreated by tyrants, and suffer persecution, and wander out of the way in the wilderness, that they may be made perfect by suffering, and purified, as gold is in the refiner’s fire, from all selfishness, conceit, ambition, cowardliness, till they learn to trust God utterly, to know their own weakness, and His strength, and to work only for Him, careless what becomes of their own poor worthless selves, provided they can help His kingdom to come, and get His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And now, my friends, surely there is a lesson in all this for you.  Do you wish to rise like David?  Of course not one in ten thousand can rise as high, but we may all rise somewhat, if not in rank, yet still, what is far better, in spirit, in wisdom, in usefulness, in manfulness.  Do you wish to rise so? then follow David’s example.  Be truly brave, be truly modest, and in order to be truly brave and truly modest, that is, be truly manly, be truly godly.  Trust in God; trust in God; that is the key to all greatness.  Courage, modesty, truth, honesty, and gentleness; all things, which are noble, lovely, and of good report; all things, in short, which will make you men after God’s own heart, are all only the different fruits of that one blessed life-giving root—Faith in God.

XXV.

DAVID’S EDUCATION

Made perfect through sufferings.—Hebrews ii. 10.

That is my text; and a very fit one for another sermon about David, the king after God’s own heart.  And a very fit one too, for any sermon preached to people living in this world now or at any time.  “A melancholy text,” you will say.  But what if it be melancholy?  That is not the fault of me, the preacher.  The preacher did not make suffering, did not make disappointment, doubt, ignorance, mistakes, oppression, poverty, sickness.  There they are, whether we like it or not.  You have only to go on to the common here, or any other common or town in England, to see too much of them—enough to break one’s heart if—, but I will not hurry on too fast in what I have to say.  What I want to make you recollect is, that misery is here round us, in us.  A great deal which we bring on ourselves; and a great deal more misery which we do not, as far as we can see, bring on ourselves; but which comes, nevertheless, and lets us know plainly enough that it is close to us.  Every man and woman of us have their sorrows.  There is no use shutting our eyes just when we ourselves happen to feel tolerably easy, and saying, as too many do, “I don’t see so very much sorrow; I am happy enough!”  Are you, friend, happy enough?  So much the worse for you, perhaps.  But at all events your neighbours are not happy enough; most of them are only too miserable.  It is a sad world.  A sad world, and full of tears.  It is.  And you must not be angry with the preacher for reminding you of what is.

True; you would have a right to quarrel with the preacher or anyone else who made you sorrowful with the thoughts of the sorrow round you, and then gave you no explanation of it—told you of no use, no blessing in it, no deliverance from it.  That would be enough to break any man’s heart, if all the preacher could say was: “This wretchedness, and sickness, and death, must go on as long as the world lasts, and yet it does no good, for God or man.”  That thought would drive any feeling man to despair, tempt him to lie down and die, tempt him to fancy that God was not God at all, not the God whose name is Love, not the God who is our Father, but only a cruel taskmaster, and Lord of a miserable hell on earth, where men and women, and worst of all, little children, were tortured daily by tens of thousands without reason, or use, or hope of deliverance, except in a future world, where not one in ten of them will be saved and happy.  That is many people’s notion of the world—religious people’s even.  How they can believe, in the face of such notions, “that God is love;” how they can help going mad with pity, if that is all the hope they have for poor human beings, is more than I can tell.  Not that I judge them—to their own master they stand or fall: but this I do say, that if the preacher has no better hope to give you about this poor earth, then I cannot tell what right he has to call himself a preacher of the gospel—that is, a preacher of good news; then I do not know what Jesus Christ’s dying to take away the sins of the world means; then I do not know what the kingdom of God means; then I do not know why the Lord taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,” if the only way in which that can be brought about is by His sending ninety-nine hundredths of mankind to endless torture, over and above all the lesser misery which they have suffered in this life.  What will be the end of the greater part of mankind we do not know; we were not intended to know.  God is love, and God is justice, and His justice is utterly loving, as well as His love utterly just; so we may very safely leave the world in the hands of Him who made the world, and be sure that the Judge of all the earth will do right, and that what is right is certain never to be cruel, but rather merciful.  But to every one of you who are here now, a preacher has a right, ay, and a bounden duty, to say much more than that.  He is bound to tell you good news, because God has called you into His church, and sent you here this day, to hear good news.  He has a right to tell you, as I tell you now, that, strange as it may seem, whatsoever sufferings you endure are sent to make you perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect; even as the blessed Lord, whom may you all love, and trust, and worship, for ever and ever, was made perfect by sufferings, even though He was the sinless Son of God.  Consider that.  “It behoved Him,” says St. Paul, “the Captain of our salvation, to be made perfect through sufferings.”  And why?  “Because,” answers St. Paul, “it was proper for Him to be made in all things like His brothers”—like us, the children of God—“that He might be a faithful and merciful high priest;” for, just “because He has suffered being tempted, He is able to succour us who are tempted.”  A strange text, but one which, I think, this very history of David’s troubles will help us to understand.  For it was by suffering, long and bitter, that God trained up David to be a true king, a king over the Jews, “after God’s own heart.”

You all know, I hope, something at least of David’s psalms.  Many of them, seven of them at least, were written during David’s wanderings in the mountains, when Saul was persecuting him to kill him, day after day, month after month, as you may read in the First Book of Samuel, from chapters xix. to xxviii.  Bitter enough these troubles of David would have been to any man, but what must have made them especially bitter and confusing to him was, that they all arose out of his righteousness.  Because he had conquered the giant, Saul envied him—broke his promise of giving David his daughter Merab—put his life into extreme danger from the Philistines, before he would give him his second daughter Michal; the more he saw that the Lord was with David, and that the young man won respect and admiration by behaving himself wisely, the more afraid of him Saul was; again and again he tried to kill him; as David was sitting harmless in Saul’s house, soothing the poor madman by the music of his harp, Saul tries to stab him unawares; and not content with that proceeds deliberately to hunt him down, from town to town, and wilderness to wilderness; sends soldiers after him to murder him; at last goes out after him himself with his guards.  Was not all this enough to try David’s faith?  Hardly any man, I suppose, since the world was made, had found righteousness pay him less; no man was ever more tempted to turn round and do evil, since doing good only brought him deeper and deeper into the mire.  But no, we know that he did not lose his trust in God; for we have seven psalms, at least, which he wrote during these very wanderings of his; the fifty-second, when Doeg had betrayed him to Saul; the fifty-fourth, when Ziphim betrayed him; the fifty-sixth, when the Philistines took him in Gath; the fifty-seventh, “when he fled from Saul in the cave;” the fifty-ninth, “when they watched the house to kill him;” the sixty-third, “when he was in the wilderness of Judah;” the thirty-fourth, “when he was driven away by Abimelech;” and several more which appear to have been written about the same time.

Now, what strikes us first, or ought to strike us, in these psalms, is David’s utter faith in God.  I do not mean to say that David had not his sad days, when he gave himself up for lost, and when God seemed to have forsaken him, and forgotten his promise.  He was a man of like passions with ourselves; and therefore he was, as we should have been, terrified and faint-hearted at times.  But exactly what God was teaching and training him to be, was not to be fainthearted—not to be terrified.  He began in his youth by trusting God.  That made him the man after God’s own heart, just as it was the want of trust in God which made Saul not the man after God’s own heart, and lost him his kingdom.  In all those wanderings and dangers of David’s in the wilderness, God was training, and educating, and strengthening David’s faith according to His great law: To whomsoever hath shall be given, and he shall have more abundantly; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he seems to have.  And the first great fruit of David’s firm trust in God was his patience.

He learned to wait God’s time, and take God’s way, and be sure that the same God who had promised that he should be king, would make him king when he saw fit.  He knew, as he says himself, that the Strength of Israel could not lie or repent.  He had sworn that He would not fail David.  And he learned that God had sworn by His holiness.  He was a holy, just, righteous God; and David and David’s country now were safe in His hands.  It was his firm trust in God which gave him strength of mind to use no unfair means to right himself.  Twice Saul, his enemy, was in his power.  What a temptation to him to kill Saul, rid himself of his tormentor, and perhaps get the kingdom at once!  But no.  He felt: “This Saul is a wicked, devil-tormented murderer, a cruel tyrant and oppressor; but the same God who chose me to be king next, chose him to be king now.  He is the Lord’s anointed.  God put him where he is, and leaves him there for some good purpose; and when God has done with him, God will take him away, and free this poor oppressed people; and in the meantime, I, as a private man, have no right to touch him.  I must not do evil that good may come.  If I am to be a true king, a true man at all hereafter, I must keep true now; if I am to be a righteous lawgiver hereafter, I must respect and obey law myself now.  The Lord be judge between me and Saul; for He is Judge, and He will right me better than I can ever right myself.”  And thus did trust in God bring out in David that true respect for law, without which a king, let him be as kind-hearted as he will, is but too likely to become at last a tyrant and an oppressor.

But another thing which strikes any thinking man in David’s psalms, is his strong feeling for the poor, and the afflicted, and the oppressed.  That is what makes the Psalms, above all, the poor man’s book, the afflicted man’s book.  But how did he get that fellow-feeling for the fallen?  By having fallen himself, and tasted affliction and oppression.  That was how he was educated to be a true king.  That was how he became a picture and pattern—a “type,” as some call it, of Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows.  That is why so many of David’s psalms apply so well to the Lord; why the Lord fulfilled those psalms when He was on earth.  David was truly a man of sorrows; for he had not only the burden of his own sorrows to bear, but that of many others.  His parents had to escape, and to be placed in safety at the court of a heathen prince.  His friend Abimelech the priest, because he gave David bread when he was starving, and Goliath’s sword—which, after all, was David’s own—was murdered by Saul’s hired ruffians, at Saul’s command, and with him his whole family, and all the priests of the town, with their wives and children, even to the baby at the breast.  And when David was in the mountains, everyone who was distressed, and in debt, and discontented, gathered themselves to him, and he became their captain; so that he had on him all the responsibility, care, and anxiety of managing all those wild, starving men, many of them, perhaps, reckless and wicked men, ready every day to quarrel among themselves, or to break out in open riot and robbery against the people who had oppressed them; for—(and this, too, we may see from David’s psalms, was not the smallest part of his anxiety)—the nation of the Jews seems to have been in a very wretched state in David’s time.  The poor seem in general to have lost their land, and to have become all but slaves to rich nobles, who were grinding them down, not only by luxury and covetousness, but often by open robbery and bloodshed.  The sight of the misrule and misery, as well as of the bloody and ruinous border inroads which were kept up by the Philistines and other neighbouring tribes, seems for years to have been the uppermost, as well as the deepest thought in David’s mind, if we may judge from those psalms of his, of which this is the key-note; and it was not likely to make him care and feel less about all that misery when he remembered (as we see from his psalms he remembered daily) that God had set him, the wandering outlaw, no less a task than to mend it all; to put down all that oppression, to raise up that degradation, to train all that cowardice into self-respect and valour, to knit into one united nation, bound together by fellow-feeling and common faith in God, that mob of fierce, and greedy, and (hardest task of all, as he himself felt) utterly deceitful men.  No wonder that his psalms begin often enough with sadness, even though they may end in hope and trust.  He had a work around him and before him which ought to have made his heart sad, which was a great part of his appointed education, and helped to make him perfect by sufferings.

And so, upon the bare hill-side, in woods and caves of the earth, in cold and hunger, in weariness and dread of death, did David learn to be the poor man’s king, the poor man’s poet, the singer of those psalms which shall endure as long as the world endures, and be the comfort and the utterance of all sad hearts for evermore.  Agony it was, deep and bitter, and for the moment more hopeless than the grave itself, which crushed out of the very depths of his heart that most awful and yet most blessed psalm, the twenty-second, which we read in church every Good Friday.  The “Hind of the Morning” is its title; some mournful air to which David sang it, giving, perhaps, the notion of a timorous deer roused in the morning by the hunters and the hounds.  We read that psalm on Good Friday, and all say that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled it.  What do we mean hereby?

We mean hereby, that we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled all sorrows which man can taste.  He filled the cup of misery to the brim, and drained it to the dregs.  He was afflicted in all David’s afflictions, in the afflictions of all mankind.  He bare all their sicknesses, and carried all their infirmities; and therefore we read this psalm upon Good Friday, upon the day in which He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest depths of terror, and shame, and agony, and death; and, worst of all, into the feeling that God had forsaken Him, that there was no help or hope for Him in heaven, as well as earth—no care or love in the great God, whose Son He was—went down, in a word, into hell; that hell whereof David and Heman, and Hezekiah after them, had said, “Shall the dust give thanks unto thee? and shall it declare thy truth?”—“Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.”—“My life draweth nigh unto hell. . .  I am like one stript among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more; and they are cut off from thy hand. . . .  Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? and shall the dead arise and praise thee?  Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of destruction?”—“For the grave cannot praise thee; death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down to the pit cannot hope for thy truth.”