FORMED LIKE DAVID

Sermon Summary from November 8, “Formed Like David”

There are parts of the Old Testament that I love.  Then there are those parts you can never tell at Children’s time.  There is incredible violence.  Even with our 20th and 21st century numbing, we don’t like to read it in our Holy Book.  It upsets our sensibilities.  We come to understand that life then was cheap.  We don’t like that.

We’re studying the life of David, chosen by God at the age of 10 or 12 to replace a failed King Saul.  Chosen so that God could form him for the task.  It will be twenty years before David sits on the throne.  In the meantime, he faces many trials.  He plays the harp for Saul and there are two instances where Saul wants to pin him to the wall with a spear.  That upsets our sensibilities too.  We had a book of Bible stories in our home when I grew up with a picture of Saul and his spear threatening David.  Abuse!  That’s not even the kind of book we can take to school for “show and tell” in this day and age.

How do you explain the violence in the Old Testament (or for the New Testament for that matter—how do you explain the slaughter of innocents?)?  One way we might explain it is that God worked with what he had.  Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.  By the time of Noah, God was sorry he had made us.  But since God is God he gave us another chance.  Then there are terrible stories in Judges, stories we don’t even tell in Adult Sunday School.

After the Judges, the people demand a King.  Saul fails by choosing military expediency over obedience to God.  In the battle for the throne, Saul tries over and over again to kill David.  But David says, “God forbid that I should put forth my hand against the Lord’s anointed.”  In two stories, David has Saul dead to rights but he chooses “good” in order to strive to influence Saul.  He chooses good over evil.

David, formed by God.  There seems to be a significant transition that takes place in Biblical ethics in the story of David and Saul: It moves from an “eye for and eye” to “overcome evil with good.”  He strives to apply the Golden Rule a thousand years before Jesus and Paul would teach these ethical principles.

Too often we find “an eye for an eye” more satisfying that loving our enemies, praying for those who persecute us, applying the Golden Rule.  We need to live each day, looking ahead to whom we will meet, what circumstance we might encounter and striving to overcome evil with good, applying the Golden Rule.