August 23  Was David Really A Man After God’s Heart?  II Sam 22:1-7,21-35

     Who is the most fully alive human being you know?  Someone who really loves life and lives life and seems to need three lifetimes to do all they want to do?  I know a professor at Furman who was once an Olympic ski racer, was a police officer, has lived in several different countries, has written books, has taught at several universities including one year at Harvard, is constantly invited to consult in business and industry at the highest levels, runs a non-profit development organization with world wide membership, and is married with three children.  When I read this man’s resume, it seems as if it is describing two or three different people.  He is one of the most alive people I know.   Do you know anyone like that?  And how about you?  When are you most alive, most fully human?  Do you ever wish that you were more fully alive to the possibilities around you?

 David was a man who was most fully alive.  From shepherd boy alone in the wilderness to refugee being chased in the desert to king ruling on the public stage, David was always a live wire.  And that is how God would have us to be.  Irenaeus, the 2^nd century church father who was a spiritual grandson of the Apostle John, wrote that “the glory of God is a fully alive human being.”  You see, God made us to be human and to be alive and to enjoy this being alive.   David so fits this description.  In the midst of this scripture which we read, David shouts with joy, “By my God, I can leap over a wall.”  Amazing words from an old man about to die.  Perfect words to be written on David’s tombstone.  “By my God, I can leap over a wall.” 

Today is our last message on David.  Over the past year, we have spent sixteen weeks talking about David.  I hope you have learned some new things about this amazing man.  But as we conclude, we have to ask one final question.  Was David a man after God’s own heart?  This is a phrase and title that is attached to David’s name throughout the Bible.  But what does it mean?  Some people hear that phrase and think that David must have been some sort of perfect person.  But we have seen that David made tragic mistakes and sins.  So what does the Bible mean when it says that David was a man after God’s heart? And was he really? Let’s look at these last words of David.

Look at vs 1-7.  David says that God is a bedrock under his feet.  The single most characteristic thing about David’s life is God.  David believed in God, thought about God, prayed to God, sang to God.  If you look at his Psalms, you see David’s saturated awareness of God through his wide use of many, many metaphors.  God is a bedrock, a castle, a knight, a boulder, a hideout, and a rock.  Rock is David’s favorite image.  As David wandered through the wilderness of his life in the Middle East, rocks were everywhere.  Rocks were strong.  Rocks were weapons.  Rocks were pillows to sleep on at night.  Now listen.  It was not that David so much went looking for these rocks.  Rocks were just there everywhere.  The first thing we see in these verses is not so much that David’s heart has sought after God but that God has sought after David’s heart.  God is just there all around him.  Just like a rock.  This is deep poetry.  David was among the finest poets who lived.  His poems in the Psalms have comforted, challenged, uplifted millions of people through the ages.  And millions of people have agreed that the poet of the Psalms was the archetypal, large hearted, fully alive human being.  When Michelangelo looked for the ideal man of the renaissance, he carved out of a block of marble a statue of David.  David was most fully alive not because David sought God but because God was at work in the heart of David.

Now look at verse 21 and following.  David begins to speak of how he did seek God.  God first reached out for David but David responded to God’s love.     You see, you and I have an important role in how our life will be.  As our character develops, as we make decisions, as we form habits, as we obey commandments.  In all these ways, we become who we will be in life.  In the first 7 verses, we see that God is the main background of David’s life.  Now we see the little daily matters that Make David a man after God’s heart.  It does not happen in one big decision or one major accomplishment.  It happens over many years.  Vs. 21 and following is the poetry of a mature man looking back at his life.  And he sees that even in the midst of his mistakes, God was able to form him into a man of God.   David was not a perfect man without sin.  But that is why David’s story is a gospel story.  God is doing for David what David could never do for himself.  A sinner saved by the grace of God.  It is what God can do for each one of us.

Look at verses 29 and following.  When David looks back at his life, he is thankful to God for his salvation so many times.  And David’s prayer at this point becomes a witness of how God enabled him to do the work of God in his life.  But here is where so many people, including myself, struggle with the story of David and the work of David.   When we look at the actual work that David does in his life, we are shocked.  David’s primary work is war.  David has spent most of his life since he was a teenager killing the Philistines.  David is a man of blood.  How can he be a man after God’s heart?

 You will have to follow closely to see where I am heading now.  Some of you will not hear me correctly and you will leave deciding that David was a man of violence and so he was not a man after God’s heart.  Others of you will not hear me correctly and you will decide that David’s violence was no problem—it was commanded by God—and so David was a man after God’s heart.  But both views are lacking. 

David was not the man after God’s most perfect heart and will.  That would be Jesus.  David was a man of blood and because of that fact, he was not allowed to build the temple.  His son Solomon, a man of peace was to build the temple.  God specifically tells David that he cannot build the temple because he is a man of war.  War and violence are not the most perfect will of God.  Jesus tells us to love our enemies, turn the other check, and to pray for those who abuse us.  David shows these loving characteristics at times such as when he spares Saul’s life in the cave.  But David is predominantly a man of war.  So David does not reveal to us the perfect heart of God.

However, David is also led by God and empowered by God for war against the Philistines.  As I have said before, the Philistine people were people who had arrived from the Aegean Sea, from areas near Greece.  They came to the Middle East by ships loaded with weapons made from iron.  Weapons never seen before in Israel where only bronze tools were available.  The Philistines were a more technologically advanced people in the way of the Europeans who arrived in the Americas and conquered the native Indians.  These Philistines arrived, conquered, killed, raped and enslaved the native Israelite population.  In the midst of this disaster, the simple people of Israel sought their first king to save them but Saul did not work out.  And so emerges David to slay Goliath, to lead Israel in battle against these invaders, to repel them back into the sea.  To understand David, we must understand the real life conditions in which he lived.  This was 1000 BC, the beginning of the Iron Age, a time of rapid technological advancement and for conquest made by those who had the new technology.  It was an age of violence.   And David lived, David had to live, in that real world.  God’s perfect will would certainly be for all people to live in peace.  God’s perfect will would have been for the People of Israel to have remained as they were living without war.  But the Philistines did come with their weapons of destruction and it became the will of God for the people to defend themselves.

We might compare David to a police officer today who confronts an angry young man with a gun on a college campus.  The young man is not in his right mind.  He is shooting.  Students are in danger.  What is the police officer to do?   Now the most perfect will of God would have been that the young man would never have become so enraged.  He would never have had that gun.   But now he is there.  This is the reality of an imperfect world.  It is the world in which we must live.  And that police officer will shoot that young man.   How shall we now judge the police officer? Did he do the will of God?   If we say the Christian police officer should not use violence, then we are seeking the perfect will of God.  But in an imperfect world, to do the will of God, the officer must choose the least of evils.  He cannot choose the good because there is no good.     On the other hand, many Christians fall into a “Clint Eastwood” mentality.  “Yeah, he should shoot the guy and feel good about it. The guy was a punk and deserved to be shot.”  But we know that is not the heart of God.  God weeps over that young man who had to be shot.  For the Christian police officer, soldier, or anyone who makes hard decisions, we never feel good about the use of violence.  But there is a time when it will be the will of God.  We may go home and cry about what we have had to do.  But we know that we had to do it.

In 1861, when congress declared war against the South which had succeeded the Union, many congressional representatives stood and cheered for the nation about to go to war.  But Lincoln said, “Let us not cheer for what we must do.  Let us cry even though we will do it.”   This is a hard place for the Christian to live.  But it is living our faith in the real world.  There are times when we will do what is wrong because there is no right decision left.  We will do what we believe to be the will of God in a bad situation but we will know in our hearts that it is not the perfect will of God.      

David is a man after God’s heart because David seeks to do the will of God while living in the harsh and hard world of 1000 BC.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, wrote that the Christian must at times dirty his hands in seeking to save the world.  Bonhoeffer was a pacifist in the early 1930s.  Speaking of the perfect will of God, he knew that Christians should love their enemies.  But by 1942, in the midst of war and death, Bonhoeffer joined a group of German Christians who plotted to assassinate their nation’s leader, Adolf Hitler.  Bonhoeffer knew it was not the perfect will of God which was always love.  He knew it was a sad thing and he wept over his own actions. But Bonhoeffer knew that in this sad world, the will of God was to kill Hitler.  He decided to dirty his hands with the sin of violence in order to save millions of other people.  The plot failed.  Bonhoeffer was arrested, spent two years in a prison camp, and was executed just weeks before the war ended. 

I have always struggled with Old Testament passages and people like David.  I still do to this day.  David does not reveal to us the perfect will of God.  That is why he could not build the temple.  But we can learn much form David.  David reveals to us a man who while living in the Iron Age of violence is a man who transcends his own time.  He is conditioned by the time in which he lives.  But David is also more than that time.  David, the man of war, is so much more.  He is the poet.  He is the singer.  He is one who can forgive his enemies.  He is the one who has compassion on those who have failed.  He is the one who sins but confesses his sin.   David grows and develops in his life to become more than he was.  David lives in a time not of his choosing, but he is able to choose how he will live in that time.  That makes him a man after God’s heart.  It makes him fully alive as a human being. 

And you and I are the same.  We live in the world in which we live.  Conditions and situations surround us.  This time in which we live is filled with dangers, temptations, hardships, and oppression.  How shall we respond?  Some spiritual people seek to lock themselves away from the world to live a pure life of the spirit.  But God calls us to engage this world in all its sadness.  Some people let the world around them shape who they become.  But calls us not to conform to this world but to be transformed.   You and I have not chosen the times in which we live.  But we will choose how we will live in these times.  We can allow these times to shape us completely into a deformed less than human being.  Or we can transcend and overcome these times to be transformed into more than ourselves.  To be most fully alive.  To be a person after God’s heart.  Amen.