Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Samuel 20-22.

Before I get to my main point I want to touch on what I talked about in yesterday’s blog.  In today’s passage, we have another instance where Joab killed someone whom David had appointed to take his place as commander over the army of Israel (although in this case, it was only the army of Judah at the time).  We also have another instance where Abishai acted to defend David.  Just further illustrations of the complicated relationship David had with these two brothers.

I want to write about the psalm of David included here as my primary focus.  First, as I have said about this psalm in the past, I love the imagery in it.  I wish I had the talent to draw the images which it evokes in my mind’s eye.  David describes the trouble he was in with language which conveys a visual image of that distress.  I picture a cloud of grey smoke which takes on a more tangible form as it wraps around him.  Then we have the cry which carries across vast differences until it is heard by God upon His throne.  God leaps up and an earthquake of immense proportion shakes everything.  Smoke pours out from God’s nose, and fire comes out of His mouth as He bellows in anger.  The next part brings to my mind the images sometimes used for Zeus: God mounted on a chariot (although that is not what David describes), surrounded by storm clouds to the point of almost being obscured, except for the brightness of His being and the lightning which bursts forth to sunder His enemies.  That brightness is where this differs from being a more majestic display of the cartoon images I remember of Zeus on his chariot.  I picture a brightness which does not allow His form to be made out.  Then, a hand reaches out from the brightness, and the dark clouds and grasps David and lifts him out of His troubles, the grey ropes of smoke being dissipated by God’s brightness and those who turned them on David cowering in fear.

Then comes the part of the psalm which both takes me some thought to interpret, and great hope for myself when I understand what I think it says.  David says that God has dealt with him according to his righteousness and that he has not turned away from God.  David continues to say that he is blameless before God.  Yet this is recorded here only a short ways after the writer had told us about David’s affair with Bathsheba and his plot to kill her husband in order to cover it up.  So, what are we to make of this?  Well, Nathan told David that God had taken away his sin.  In the same way, we are told that God has taken away our sin through our faith in Jesus.  So, we too can present ourselves as blameless before God, as can anyone, even the most heinous sinner*, who repents of their sin and puts their faith in Christ.  I want to go back to the beginning of the psalm for a moment: I am convinced that the distress which David expressed there was about his terrible sin, and that a portion of the great rescue he experienced was God taking that sin away.  So, once God has taken our sin away, as He did David’s, we can experience what David felt when he wrote:

The Lord lives! Praise be to my Rock!
Exalted be my God, the Rock, my Savior!

Therefore I will praise you, Lord, among the nations;
I will sing the praises of your name.

*I want to go back and touch on that bit about the “heinous sinner”.  Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1:15 that he is the worst of all sinners.  And I as I wrote this today it occurred to me that we too should think of ourselves as having been the worst of all sinners, saved only by God’s marvelous grace to become holy and blameless in His sight.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.