Peter Barnes | 2 Samuel 1:1-27
SERMON NOTES
DAVID’S GRIEF
2 Samuel 1; Acts 5:1-11
2 Sam. 1-5 tells how David became king over all Israel; 2 Sam. 6-10 of God’s covenant with him, and his victories; 2 Sam. 11-12 of his fall into sin; and 2 Sam. 13-24 of his troubles in his declining years.
1. Justice for a scheming liar.
– 1:1-16. Quite obviously, the Amalekite was lying. W. G. Blaikie: ‘He was evidently one of those base men that count all men as base as themselves.’
2. The greater the love, the greater the grief.
– the Song of the Bow (1:19-27). Calvin regards some of it as excessive. Walter Chantry: ‘there has come into some circles a silly notion that the death of saints should be celebrated as a triumph.’
– We are meant to grieve – 1 Thess.4:13.
– David writes a kind of folk song here with a refrain: ‘How the mighty have fallen!” (1:19, 25, 27) The Directory for the Publick Worship of God in 1645 declared that the deceased should be ‘immediately interred, without any ceremony.’ That is overdone
– Hebrews 11 majors on the faith of the Old Testament saints, and omits their obvious sins e.g. Heb.11:11-12, 32.
3. Excessive grief.
– The NIV has ‘gracious’ in verse 23 in describing Saul, but that is too much (ESV ‘lovely’; NKJV ‘pleasant’).
– Proverbs 24:17-18. Something Christ-like in David’s grief.