AP

2 Samuel 15:25-26, 30    Then the king said to Zadok, “Take the ark of God back into the city.  If I find favor in the LORD’s eyes, he will bring me back and let me see it and his dwelling place again.  But if he says, ‘I am not pleased with you,’ then I am ready; let him do to me whatever seems good to him. ” … … But David continued up the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went; his head was covered and he was barefoot.  All the people with him covered their heads too and were weeping as they went up.

These verses give us a deep insight into David’s heart – and the more I read his psalms the more I want to learn from him.

His self-serving, egotistical son, Absalom, had successfully conspired against him, wooed the people with persuasive ‘sweet talk’, and gained enough support to proclaim himself as King.  In the light of what we know of David up to this point, we might have expected him to stand strong and firm for truth and righteousness against this wicked conspiracy, but, instead, he packed up and fled from the inevitable slaughter that would follow for him and those with him.  Why this atypical lack of courage and apparent change in character?

It seems there are two contributing factors.

Firstly, throughout Absalom’s whole life David had allowed ‘soft love’ to overshadow ‘tough love’, and there was a failure to apply the firm discipline that must always accompany genuine fatherly love (Proverbs 3:12, Hebrews 12:6), and this meant that Absalom had been ‘spoilt rotten’, and it was too late for David to escape from this emotional bind he was now in.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, David’s true humility and self-awareness before the LORD his God led him to see the possibility that now, in the outworking of God’s sovereign providence, the time had come for someone else to take over as King.

We can see how all the internal conflict David was experiencing because of these factors led to his ‘weeping as he went’, and his ‘barefoot’ shame.

So, what do I learn?  The importance of tough love expressing itself in firm discipline no matter how emotionally draining it might be to work through.  And the need to always walk humbly before God and to say “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, to let him be God, regardless of the cost.

Should David have actively resisted Absalom’s wicked conspiracy, especially when he had been told that Solomon was to be his successor?  What prevented him from doing so?

The Prophet Micah helps me towards an answer to these questions: “He has shown you, O man, what is good.  And what does the LORD require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly before your God.”  (Micah 6:8).  It is the ‘walking humbly before God’ that helps us to resolve the inevitable tension between ‘acting justly’ and ‘loving mercy’!

– Bruce Christian