SERMON IV.

DAVID THE KING.

(Lincoln's Inn, 3rd Sunday in Advent. - Dec. 14, 1851.)

2 SAMUEL v. 12.

"And David perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, and that He had exalted his Kingdom for His people Israel's sake."

Such

THIS language, some may think, would have been suitable and pious, if an extraordinary, evidently miraculous, event had raised David to the throne of Israel. an event might have enabled him to perceive that he was divinely elected to reign; he might have continued to reign with the same comfortable assurance. But he appears to have risen quite as slowly,-under the same course of accidents, as other leaders of troops in tolerably quiet conditions of society, to say nothing of those which are utterly anarchical. He belonged to an honourable tribe, he had performed great exploits, he had strong popular sympathy with him, increased by the unfair treatment he had undergone from Saul. He had the command of a body of compact, devoted, even desperate followers. Saul and Jonathan were dead. Battles and assassinations,— perpetrated by men hoping to gain rewards from him, or under the influence of private enmity,—removed his rival

Iv.]

HOW GOD ESTABLISHES A KING.

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out of his way. What man who has not taken some very outrageous method of establishing his power, might not say that the Lord had bestowed his dominion upon him, if that phrase became the lips of the shepherd-sovereign?

I

This is a question which I am not able to answer. do not know what king might not safely adopt these words and ought not to adopt them. The danger, I fancy, lies in the disbelief of them, or in the idle use of them when no definite meaning is attached to them. So far from admitting that David would have had more right or would have been more likely to think and speak as he did, if some angel suddenly appearing had placed the crown upon his head, I apprehend that the strength and liveliness of his conviction arose from the number of conspiring accidents, often seemingly cross accidents, which had led him into so new and dangerous a position. It was the successiveness, the continuity, of the steps in his history, which assured him that God's hand had been directing the whole of it. One startling event would have made no such impression upon him. That he might have referred to chance, or to the rare irregular interference of an omnipotent being. Only such a Being as the Lord God of Abraham,-only one who had guided each patriarch and the whole nation from age to age through strange unknown. ways, could have woven the web of his destinies, could have controlled his proceedings and the proceedings of indifferent, of unrighteous, men. Had David,-instead of maintaining the ground which circumstances pointed out to him as his, seized violently that which was not his, he would not have perceived that the Lord had made him king of Israel; he would have felt that he had made himself So, and would have acted upon that persuasion.

56 THE DIVINE KING RULES FOR HIS PEOPLE. [SERM.

For the two clauses of the sentence are intimately and inseparably connected. David perceived that God had established his kingdom, and he knew that He had exalted it for His people Israel's sake. A government which a man wins for himself, he uses for himself. That which he inwardly and practically acknowledges as conferred upon him by a righteous being, cannot be intended for himself. And thus it is, that the early and mysterious teaching of David while he was in the sheepfolds, bore so mightily upon his life after he became a king. The deepest lesson which he had learnt, was that he himself was under government; that in his heart and will was the inmost circle of that authority which the winds and the sea, the moon and the stars obeyed. We have seen how the sense of this invisible kingdom was awakened in him; how it was quickened by all joyful and bitter experiences, by the care of sheep and the society of outlaws. To understand that the empire over wills and hearts is the highest which man can exercise, because it is the highest which God exercises; to understand that his empire cannot be one of rough compulsion, because the divinest power is not of this kind; to understand that the necessity for stern, quick, inevitable punishment, arises from the unwillingness of men to abide under a yoke of grace and gentleness; to understand that the law looks terrible and overwhelming to the wrong-doer, just because he has shaken off his relation to the Person from whom law issues, in whom dwells all humanity and sympathy, all forgiveness and reclaiming mercy, this was the highest privilege of a Jewish king, that upon which the rightful exercise of all his functions depended.

Two memorable passages in the history of David,-the

IV.]

THE CAPITAL.

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establishment of his capital, and the removal of the ark to the hill above it,-illustrate the principles upon which his kingdom stood; and show wherein it differed from the great Asiatic empires which were contemporary with it and which had existed nearly in the same form perhaps centuries before the birth of Abraham. The first sign of the unity of these monarchies was the building of some great city, Babylon, or Calah, or Nineveh. The inhabitants of such cities felt that they were a people because they were compassed with walls. Within those walls there speedily were built temples to some of the powers of nature which they feared. Very soon, as we now have such good means of knowing, the arts of sculpture came forth, doing honour to animal forms, which for their strength or their swiftness were believed to be divine. With a great hunter as a ruler, with one of these cities as the centre of their strength, with divinities thus conceived and visibly represented as their protectors, these Asiatic worlds continually enlarged their limits, absorbed new tribes into themselves, acquired the titles of conquest and glory for one or another of their temporary masters. The commonwealth of Israel began in open plains and pastures. A single man, who had not a foot of earth for his possession, was its founder. A family of colonists, still dwelling on a land which was not theirs, succeeded to him. These became a race of Egyptian captives. They acquired laws, festivals, a polity, first in a wilderness. They struggled hard for generations with the corrupted people of the land into which they came. Only after centuries of conflicts, discomfitures, humiliations, they acquired a king, and a city which he could make the centre of their tribes. But these had been centuries of moral and political progress, of the deepest experiences for

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THE TWO KINDS OF CIVILIZATION.

[SERM.

individuals and for the whole nation, respecting the grounds of their social existence and the relation in which they stood to the visible and the invisible world. All this time they had been learning to worship a Being who was not to be made in the likeness of things in the heaven above or in the earth beneath; to apprehend him as a present, unseen Lawgiver, Judge, Deliverer, in whom they might put their trust. They learnt that a nation built upon fear and distrust must be evil while it lasts, and must at length come to ruin. Here are the two kinds of civilization; the civic life, the life of cities, is in one the beginning, is in the other the result, of a long process. But in the first you have a despotism, which becomes more expansive and more oppressive from day to day: expansive everywhere except in the spirits of those it rules; they are more contracted from year to year oppressive of everything but crime and disorder; they possess growing activity and freedom. In the other case, you have a struggle, sometimes a weary struggle; but it is the struggle of spirits, it is a struggle for life. And God himself is helping that struggle; is working with and for the spirits whom He has formed; is bringing them out of darkness into an ever clearer and broader light,out of confusion into a real, at last even to something like a visible and outward, unity.

But this unity does not stand in the walls of the capital city, even though that city be the holy city and the city of peace. When David had made this conquest from the Jebusites, and had set up his throne in it, he was impatient till he had brought the Ark of God there, and placed it with songs and shoutings and dancings on the holy hill. That Ark had been the witness to the people that they were one people, because they had the one God dwelling in