Faithful, Flawed And After God’s Heart - King David

David takes the sling and some stones and with his first try sinks a stone into Goliath’s brain. There’s some more messy stuff that happens with Goliath’s head that we won’t go into.

What does this episode tell you about David? Is he an opportunist who capitalizes on Saul’s vulnerable situation, or is he someone who really wants to assert the power and authority of the Lord?

Does he act out of love for himself or love for God? Does he have motive, or the other?

Sometimes we like to think that that’s the way it works.

That as we look at David we see him in stories where he’s good, and then we see him in stories where he’s bad.

We look at the good stories and we say, we’ll that’s when he was serving God fully, and we look at the bad stories that are coming up later today and we say that’s when David was completely backslidden.

I don’t think David, or we, are quite that black and white.

What I’m seeing as we explore these snapshots of David is a fellow who is faced with many choices, some good, some bad, some really, really bad...and some really, really good.

And these choices are always before him. When he chooses the good, it’s not easy to do so and things don’t always go smoothly for him after doing the right thing.

When he chooses the bad, as we’ll see, all's not lost, although there are some pretty serious consequences to his actions.

He’s a complicated guy who becomes a complicated king.

That’s what makes him interesting. Let’s look at another picture of David:

David and Saul

This is a pretty drawn out story but in a real nutshell, David had been anointed Israel’s first king, because Saul had shown himself unworthy of the title. He was not faithful to God.

Samuel proclaims and anoints David, but in the real world at that point Saul is still functioning as king, and he’s getting increasingly loopier as time progresses.

Despite his own rights to the throne, despite the fact the Saul had in fact lost the anointing of God to be king (God had withdrawn his Spirit from him), David showed nothing but respect for Saul and reverence for the crown.

Despite this Saul tries to kill David several times. Although he was the hunted, David defers to Saul, submits to his kingship, until the day that Saul dies.

This says to me that David at times made choices that showed that he saw things clearly.

Whatever longing David had for the crown, it seems that he understood at a pretty deep level that he being king was about God’s glory and not his own.

There was in David this precious quality - humility. He was not arrogant. He was not proud.

He could have been, because he was told by Samuel the prophet that he was going to be king.

But he was humble. We will see more of that in a little while.

Before that we’ll ponder an x-rated episode in David’s life that demonstrated pretty phenomenal egotism and evil

and amazing bad behaviour for a king, for a man and for one of God’s own.

David and Bathsheba

David is now king. It was spring, the time when kings go off to war. But David didn’t go off to war. That was his first problem. David sent out his army, but he remained in Jerusalem.