No White Hats
2 Samuel 19; Remsen Bible Fellowship; 10/30/2022
Introduction
I grew up watching a lot of B-movie cowboy films from the 1930s. We were huge John Wayne fans in our house, and while most people know him from roles in movies like McLintock!, The Searchers, or True Grit, we were familiar with a whole extra section of his catalog. Randy Rides Alone, Blue Steel, and Riders of Destiny were some of the ones we matched time and again. One of the interesting things about those John Waybe movies is that they often broke the mold of 1930s cowboy movies in this important respect: the good guy often wears a black hat. If you turn on a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers film from the next decade you’ll notice that all the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats. This simple costume device removed all question of who was a good guy and who was a bad guy. Just look at the hat.
And while movies don’t use that particular device anymore, our society still does. We want to split people into two groups. Good and Evil. There’s a sense in which God does divide people in such a way. Except the grouping goes like this: Evil (this includes everyone, including you and your team) and Good (which includes the Triune God. That’s it.). So good and evil actually aren’t the most helpful distinctions when trying to discern people. Rather, instead of trying to throw a label on a person and pretending to then know everything about them, we ought to try and understand people in our lives, and the characters in the stories we read, based on the actions and the fruit of their lives. And those actions and fruit can change from situation to situation, and they can change over time. What we find out in the Bible is that there really aren’t a bunch or white hats and black hats. Or maybe we could put it another way - there are white hats and black hats, but the characters seem to make a lot of wardrobe changes.
David is a character we traditionally think of in a white hat. But this far into 2 Samuel, we know that that hat doesn’t always fit his head very well. How about in chapter 19? Well, that’s complicated.
Overcome
In the opening verses of chapter 19, we find David right where we left him - sitting in Mahanaim, weeping over the death of his third-born son, Absalom.
19:1 It was told Joab, “Behold, the king is weeping and mourning for Absalom.” 2 So the victory that day was turned into mourning for all the people, for the people heard that day, “The king is grieving for his son.” 3 And the people stole into the city that day as people steal in who are ashamed when they flee in battle. 4 The king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud voice, “O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!”
In these verses, we find David giving himself over to his emotions. And we can have a lot of sympathy with that, can’t we? Just at a base level, we need to acknowledge that emotions, even very strong emotions, are a positive good; they are not something to be afraid of or run from. God gives us emotions as creatures made in his image. The book of Psalms - largely written by this emotional man, David - has been called the songbook of the soul.
And we can even see the justification in the particular sadness he is feeling at this juncture. His third born son has just been killed, his firstborn we know is already dead, and the second born has disappeared from the story, presumably dead as well. David is right to lament the tragedy of Absalom’s life and rebellion, he’s right to lament his death, and he’s even right to feel these things compounded in magnitude by his own failings as a father. David is right to weep. So when you weep, know that God does not condemn your tears. David writes in Psalm 56:8, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?”
Now, I say all of that so that you hear where I’m coming from when I say this: these public tears, in this time and place, do not reflect well on David. David’s public weeping and mourning for his son, in a time when the army should be returning with joy, is way out of line. He has taken a moment of great joy for Israel - a rebellion against the Lord’s anointed king has been squashed, the army of David has won a great victory! - and turned it into the equivalent of a funeral procession, or worse, a shameful retreat. At a time when the people would be right to rejoice and sing for praise, David has set the tone of sorrow and mourning. David’s self-absorption is causing him to fail as a king.
What David is doing in this case is not merely feeling the emotions which we might naturally expect. He is not merely expressing what’s going on inside in an “authentic” way. He’s making this whole battle all about him and his personal life, and failing to see how God is at work in preserving his people Israel. David is not just Absalom’s father. As the king, he functioned as a figurative leader and father for the entire nation of Israel, and he’s acting as if the lives of all his other children are of no importance to him. He’s allowing his emotions to run amok, cloud his thinking, and drop the ball when it comes to setting the proper emotional tone for the people as they return in triumph. If David can’t be happy, he at least ought to be grateful.
And Joab sees this failure. Now, as we’ll spend some time on next week, Joab definitely isn’t wearing a white hat most of the time, either. But for all his failures, Joab can always be counted on to call a spade a spade, and sometimes he’s the only one who will do so with David.
19:5 Then Joab came into the house to the king and said, “You have today covered with shame the faces of all your servants, who have this day saved your life and the lives of your sons and your daughters and the lives of your wives and your concubines, 6 because you love those who hate you and hate those who love you. For you have made it clear today that commanders and servants are nothing to you, for today I know that if Absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then you would be pleased. 7 Now therefore arise, go out and speak kindly to your servants, for I swear by the LORD, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night, and this will be worse for you than all the evil that has come upon you from your youth until now.”
Joab is not as cold and heartless as you might first think in this text. He acknowledges David’s hardship-scarred life (v7). He knows that David has had trouble since his youth. But he also points out that in this case, the worst evil yet could happen, and it would be his own doing. He had best pull himself together and go greet his men, thanking them for their service and bravery and loyalty, or he can forget about their protection in the future. Is this a veiled threat from Joab? It could be. Or it may simply be an acknowledgement of the situation.
Before we move on with the narrative, I want to stop and linger over this application question: what are areas of your life where you’re allowing your feelings to ride roughshod over your responsibilities? Where is what you want to do and feel like doing in conflict with what is necessary and required of you? There are countless ways this comes up, but here are two potential scenarios.
Maybe you have some conflict at work. You feel disrespected or looked down upon or left out. A very typical response in our day is to just say how you feel in that moment, throw a fit, and leave the job. No thought to the need to keep employed, or earn an income, or maintain stability. It feels uncomfortable, so we express displeasure and flee. We emphasize how we feel over the objective realities and needs of a given situation. And we prioritize self-expression over self-control. Yet Proverbs 16:32 says, “whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.” You have a spirit, you have emotions - maturity is marked by ruling your spirit.
Another situation, more pertinent to the life of David, is in parenting. Oftentimes our emotions get in the way of good parenting. This can take the obvious forms of losing control of your anger and screaming, or even physical violence in some homes. We know those things are bad. But there is a flip side to that coin, also. Not disciplining your children can also be a case of letting your emotions get in the way of godly child-rearing. David is said in 1 Kings 1:6 to have ‘never at any time displeased [his son Adonijah] by asking, “Why have you done thus and so?’ He never even asked “what are you doing?” I can guarantee that the young man never received a spanking.
Yet what do the scriptures say is the duty of parents, especially fathers?
* Proverbs 13:24, Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.
* Proverbs 19:18, Discipline your son, for there is hope; do not set your heart on putting him to death.
The clear teaching of the Bible is that withholding discipline is not an act of love or kindness - it is setting that child up for death. And it expresses no hope for better behavior and growth. We have this conversation with our kids fairly frequently: mom and dad have rules and expectations - and consequences for falling short - because we love you and believe in you.
But that requires diligence, Proverbs 13:24 says, and it means in a given situation I may have to ignore my own emotions, or my guilt because “I’m not perfect, so is it fair for me to expect my children to always obey me?” Sometimes life requires you, frankly, to stuff your feelings and do the right thing. This is part of what is meant in Scripture by “self-control.”
We need to process our emotions in healthy and God-honoring ways. But we ought to express them with wisdom, self-control, and an eye not simply to “authenticity” or “showing my true self”, but to how those things will impact your duties and responsibilities.
Again, hear me: I’m not calling for a blank, stiff-upper-lip, kind of life. I am saying that you can always tell God how you feel - you should be discerning about how you express that to or in front of others. Wearing your heart on your sleeve is seen as a value in our culture, but not in the Bible.
How do you evaluate these things? How do I know in a given situation if it’s appropriate to express a particular emotion, or allow a decision to be driven by how I feel about it? I think a helpful contrast in David’s life is between this incident and when the ark is brought back to Jerusalem in chapter 6. You could also say in that case that David is freely expressing himself before the people. But in that case it is an expression which does not center on him, it’s joy over what the Lord has done for his people. Set that against his weeping in chapter 19, where the focus is drawn away from the nation, and away from God and his work, and centered on David and his sorrow. Are you seeking to center the attention of others on God and his work, or are you looking to be the center of the story?
Thankfully, David got the message. He receives Joab’s rebuke, and in v8, he goes back out and sits at the gate. He appears before the people as their king and judge. And it seems, for a while, like he puts his white hat back on.
David, Good and Kind
As David crosses the Jordan and heads back toward Jerusalem in v16 he is met by a familiar figure - Shimei, who in chapter 16 had chased David, throwing dust and stones and cursing him all the way. Now he shows up with Ziba, the servant of Mephibosheth, and begs for forgiveness (v19-20). And though Joab’s brother Abishai would again like to put Shimei to death for his treasonous words, David forgives his enemy. He recognizes that a day of victory need not be a day for vengeance (v22-23). In this way, as he heads back to Jerusalem in triumph, he points forward to another king who forgives his enemies when they repent.
David’s wisdom is also on display in verses 24-30. Mephibosheth comes down to meet David (worth a note that though it says Saul’s son, son didn’t always mean direct descendant, and it is clear here that we are discussing Jonathan’s son, Saul’s grandson), and David asks why he didn’t come with David come to start with. In 26-28, Mephibosheth explains that Ziba deceived David. Who is lying, Ziba or Mephibosheth? Peter Liethart notes in his commentary the description of Mephibosheth in v24. This is a description of someone in mourning, so it would seem that Mephibosheth really has mourned David’s absence. David either realizes that he can’t discern between the two, or simply wants to test Mephibosheth’s loyalty, but in v29 he takes all of the land that he had just given to Ziba, and divides it between the two. If it is a test, Mephibosheth (like the mother in 1 Kings 3) passes with flying colors (v30). He doesn’t want the land, he is just happy to have David back on the throne.
In v31-40, David sets out to bless the old man Barzillai who had abundantly provided for him at Mahanaim (17:24-29). Though Barzillai is an old man who would rather stick close to home than travel to Jerusalem with the king, the king blesses him and fulfills his requests. David writes in Psalm 68 of God ascending on high and receiving gifts from men. But when Paul quotes that verse in Ephesians 4, he inverts it and says that God gives gifts to men (in that case speaking of the spiritual gifts given with the Holy Spirit’s presence). David foreshadows that here as he blesses and gives, not merely receiving.
Left Wanting
But even with this fairly positive return, we find David making a tactical error. From verses 8-10 we read of the Israelites arguing about when or if to bring back David. Instead of allowing a broad consensus to play out, David sends directly to his relatives in Judah who have tended to remain more faithful to him (v11-15). This seems like a logical enough move, except that when we come to the end of the chapter we find that this has exacerbated the already present tensions in the nation. This tactical flaw on David’s part sets up the rebellion of Sheba (and the murder of Amasa) that occupy chapter 20, which we’ll look at next week.
As we read the story of David, we come to a familiar conclusion. If we are looking for straightforward “good guys” and “bad guys”, “black hats” and “white hats”, we’re going to miss the ultimate point. The Lord Jesus said all of the Scriptures bear witness to him. And we see that even in these chapters. One day a Davidic king will return to Jerusalem, and though that will be followed by a rebellion and bloodshed (see Revelation 19), when that rebellion is quashed and cast into the lake of fire there will be no repeat cycle. We long for the return of our king. He is a king who wept over Jerusalem - who felt deeply the tragedy of his own rejection - and who yet unflinchingly will exercise judgment over all his enemies.
Jesus is a king, though, who in his first coming did not come for the purpose of judging his enemies. He came not into the world to condemn the world, John 3:17 says, but in order that the world might be saved through him. He will return in judgment. But Jesus is a king who not only is willing to pardon and give gifts of land to his enemies, but who laid down his own life in their place, and gives the abundant gifts of the Holy Spirit and eternal life to all who, like Shimei, will bow before him and give up their rebellion. In Revelation Jesus is pictured not in a white hat, but a white robe, representing his righteousness. He is the only one who has such a garmet by nature, but he will give his righteousness to you if you will trust in him. Do you know him? Have you laid down your spit and your rocks and rebellion and asked for his forgiveness? He will gladly give you forgiveness - and his whole kingdom. Trust in him.
