The Rightful Heir

2 Samuel 1

Immanuel – 7/16/23

In the last sermon series, we followed Abraham’s journey of faith as he followed God to a promised land. Now, for the past eight weeks we have been following David – also on a journey of faith. But his journey is of a different kind; not a journey towards a promised land, but a journey to a promised throne.

Today we come to the final portion of that journey, the final step before David’s ascension to the throne.

Purpose

1. David responds to Saul’s death like a righteous king.

2. David teaches us how to mourn.

Last week we left David in the Philistine city of Ziklag after having defeated the Amalekites in the far south. In the far north Saul wielded Israel’s army in defense against a massive Philistine offensive. While David was winning an overwhelming victory, Philistine forces were overwhelming Saul.

Read 1 Samuel 31:1-7

After Jonathan lay dead on the battlefield, and to save himself from a shameful and agonizing death, Saul throws himself on his sword and commits suicide. The bodies of countless young men litter the soft slopes of Mount Gilboa. The rest of the army is routed. Numerous and unnamed cities, once belonging to the northern tribes of Israel, are now occupied by Israel’s bitter enemies. The Philistines have won a resounding victory.

1 Samuel closes with visceral desperation: And the death of Saul marks the end of an era.

Though a new era begins in 2 Samuel, chapter one is really a response to the events of 1 Samuel 30. It’s the response of David – the subject and focus of 2 Samuel.

Read vs 1

Though 2 Samuel opens with words announcing the death of Saul, David has no knowledge that the king is dead. He was in Israel’s deep south defeating the Amalekites and it was no coincidence he was so far removed from Saul’s death.

Remember, David joined the Philistine muster in Aphek and appeared ready to fight against Saul. But the Philistines rejected him and sent him home. But upon his arrival he found Ziklag destroyed, and all their families taken. This drove him further south to pursue the Amalekite raiders and rescue the taken families – his two wives included.

God was using these events, orchestrating these events, to get David as far as possible from the battle of Mount Gilboa. This way David did not have to face Saul, anointed versus anointed, rejected versus rising. And this way no one could claim that David had taken the throne by blood or by force. God was protecting David’s royal ascension.

David returned from his victory against the Amalekites and was three days in Ziklag when a stranger arrives with urgent news.

Read vs 2-4

The Amalekite

The man’s appearance is not one of recent battle – torn clothes and dirt on his head. This is the appearance of a mourner, which David and his men would have instantly recognized. They too would soon adopt this same look.

The man bows himself to the ground before David. It’s what a person would do before a king. Clearly, this man knows who David is and what trajectory David is on.

David was more than aware that a massive battle was gathering in the north. But the latest news he possesses is now more than a week old. (How different from our day, when we get almost instantaneous updates on wars unfolding on the other side of the planet.) David must feel a simultaneous sense of relief and anxiety hearing that this man had come from the battle: Relief because he now can get updates, anxiety because the man is dressed as a mourner and said he had to escape.

You can hear the desperate urgency in David’s question: “How did it go? Tell me.”

Israel has fled. Many are slain. Saul and Jonathan are dead. Could the news have been any worse?

I imagine heavy dread in David’s next question.

Read vs 5-10

The first thing you may notice is that this Amalekite’s story contradicts what we read in 1 Samuel 30. He claims to have mercy killed Saul, rather than Saul taking his own life. And the text does nothing to resolve this conflict for us. It just drops a bomb and leaves us to wrestle with its implications. There’s a reason for this, which I will get to later.

But upon close inspection, it is not too difficult to resolve the apparent contradiction; and with this resolution it will help us to understand why the Amalekite messenger is executed.

The details of verse 10 should begin to stir our suspicions. If you stumbled across the king of Israel – mortally wounded – and you killed him for mercy’s sake, would you then think of stripping his body? It’s the move of someone who is cold and calculating. He knows that the crown and armlet are symbols of royal legitimacy. He unhesitatingly takes them and runs to David.

As Walter Bruggemann so insightfully writes: The killer-messenger “imagines he is single-handedly making a king, a new king, and giving him legitimacy through the accouterments of royalty…Did all this happen accidentally, or is this a self-serving scavenger? We are not told. Surely those who stood in David’s presence watched and waited to see how the king would respond.”1

In other words, is this Amalekite lying about killing Saul? Did he just happen across the king’s body, strip it, and now he’s seeking some praise and position from David? Is this man really such a weasel?

It takes a discerning mind to penetrate through the man’s words and see his motivations: Such a mind David possesses. And for David, all he knows is this man’s story. He has no idea that Saul may have died in some other manner.

But before David asks his next and final question, the question that will expose the Amalekite’s intentions, he is unable to restrain his emotion any longer.

Read vs 11-12

David could have rejoiced over the news just delivered. After all, he is God’s anointed and the rightful heir: The throne is now his for the taking. But David responds in a way the Amalekite could not have imagined. David is overcome with sorrow, grief, pain, horror.

David mourns the north, lost to Philistine occupation. David mourns the loss of the slain; so many of Israel’s precious sons. David mourns his closest friend, taken too soon. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, David mourns the death of Saul. For though Saul hated and hunted David, he was still the Lord’s anointed and the hope of Israel. For a final time, and in spite of everything, David shows how deeply loyal he was to Saul.

David responds to Saul’s death like a righteous king should. As we will soon see in poetic form, David mourns for all of Israel. It seems so natural for David to act as a royal figurehead for the nation, even in his sorrow.

Surely this deep mourning does not bode well for the Amalekite.

Read vs 13-16

When David asks, Where do you come from, he already knows he is an Amalekite. It’s not a question of origin. David is trying to determine how connected this man is to covenant with Yahweh. Based on the man’s answer, he understands this is what David is asking. He is the son of a sojourner.

Both David and the Amalekite know that sojourners were to be treated as well as any Israelite. It was the command of Yahweh.

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”

-Leviticus 19:33-34

But if an outsider decided to live in community with Israel, they were also required to live under covenant law.

“Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death…If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. Whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death. You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the LORD your God.”

-Leviticus 24:17,19-22

There is no exception for assisted suicide. Under Covenant Law, whoever kills shall be put to death – whatever the intentions were of the killer. God is the one who gives and takes life. (Mosaic law does make exception for accidental death and just warfare). Again, David knows no different than what the Amalekite tells him, only that he is a self-proclaimed murderer.

Though the Amalekite comes from a family of sojourners, his eager admittance of killing Saul reveals he is no different than the Amalekites David has just returned from defeating. He is physically and spiritually uncircumcised. Thus, in the strictest sense of the law, the mercy-killing Amalekite deserves the death penalty.

And how much more does he deserve death for slaying the king, the anointed! Any action against God’s anointed was action against Yahweh Himself!

But there is yet another layer. There is always another layer. Remember from last week’s sermon: one of the primary reasons God rejected Saul was because Saul rebelled against God and refused to entirely eliminate the Amalekites in battle. Now here is an Amalekite, boldly claiming to have killed Saul, having stripped his body.

I think this is why the text is silent on the tension between 1 Samuel 30 and 2 Samuel 1. It looks like Saul was thrust to his death both by the Philistines and the Amalekites: The two enemies God called the king to defeat, the two enemies that Saul failed to rightly deal with. Now it is these very enemies that have become a curse to Saul, right to the bitter end.

But David is a king of another sort. He has already defeated the Amalekites in the south, and he has this slimy Amalekite messenger executed for his murder. And soon enough, David will deal with the Philistines occupying the north.

But before a royal reshuffle and an inevitable war in the north, the people of Israel need a moment. They need a moment to express their grief: something this heir to the throne knows and profoundly needs himself.

Read vs 17-18

The Poem of Lament

Here David begins a public and formal lament. It follows a traditional funeral song, similar to what we find in the book of Lamentations. It is a poetic song overflowing with profound hurt and precious loss, and it gives Israel a voice to remember and release.

How we can learn from David and this Biblical tradition! When death sweeps away those we love and steals away our hopes, how painfully good it is to lament together and linger for a moment with our tears. Let us never try to rush one another past the pain. Let us be unashamed of grief, for death is a fearsome foe and the separation it brings is to be despised.

David is so unashamed of his sorrow that he pens a poem and puts it to song – as he so often did. I love this man: a warrior, a king, an unashamed poet. He writes for Judah. He writes for Israel. He writes for us.

Read vs 19-20

When we are grieved by loss, it becomes much easier to overlook a person’s faults and failures. We romanticize and speak in hyperbole. For example, we might say, “They would light up a room whenever they entered it.” But that’s a hyperbolic statement, a bit of an exaggeration. Do they really have that effect on people every time they enter?

David is doing the same sort of thing in this lament. Saul failings have melted away and now he speaks of Saul as mighty, as Israel’s glory – Jonathan too.

But though David may be romanticizing Saul’s life, he’s capturing what’s true in so many Israelite minds. Saul, their king, was their glory. He was to be the embodiment of all that was good and brave and mighty in the land. The hopes of the people were tied up in him. The king would deliver them from the Philistine threat. The king would bring peace and prosperity and rest.

But now the violence of battle has slain the glory of Israel. A nation’s dreams lay dead beside the king!

The end of verse 19 is the refrain of the lament: How the mighty have fallen. It’s repeated two other times.

Read vs 21-23

A soldier would rub, or anoint, his leather shield with oil before battle to help it from becoming brittle. But the shield of the king will be anointed no more. And David calls down a curse upon Mount Gilboa, the place of Saul’s last stand.

See how David lifts Saul and Jonathan in death. It’s almost like he wishes he could raise them by elevating their memory. Surely both were fierce warriors: Saul with his sword and Jonathan with his bow. Faster than eagles and stronger than lions, fearsome for any foe.

Read vs 24-25a

Here David remembers Saul in better days, before the madness, before the descent into darkness. He remembers a time when Saul was met with victory in battle, and plunder brought luxury to the daughters of Israel. It’s certainly a hyperbolic statement. None-the-less, they are to weep for the loss of their king; in contrast to the daughters of the Philistines who David wants their celebrations to be silenced in verse 20.

Read vs 25b-27

David’s attention now turns wholly to Jonathan, closing his lament with his greatest sense of loss.

Jonathan was not blood, but he was a brother. When he writes, “your love surpassed the love of women,” there is not a hint of homoeroticism. Jonathan’s love for David was deep loyalty, with total political commitment, covenant-bound, self-sacrificing, and self-effacing. It was a unique and brotherly love; one that David never found in a woman. And we will see in the coming weeks, David’s romantic relationships were fraught with problems.

His friendship with Jonathan was unique in all of David’s life. No one was ever so aligned to David’s heart as Jonathan was. The pain and sadness spills from the words, I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan.

How the mighty have fallen.

2 Samuel opens with this incredible emotionally complex chapter. Saul has been David’s relentless enemy, and his death must come with some sense of relief. Saul’s death also opens the door for promise to become reality. By God’s choosing, David is the rightful heir. It is his time to reign. His heart must be struck with the gravity and the hopefulness of this dawning new era.

And yet these developments of promise are cast in darkness by the death of what is lovely and precious. Greatness and glory is overwhelmed with anguish. It’s so real to the human experience. It’s so relatable for us these many millennia later.

So many in this room know what it is for life’s storms to steal away our hopes and rob us of our beloveds. I can hardly remember my mother. You have lost sons, daughters, parents. Do not be ashamed of the tears. And let us not think we can comfort by trying to speed mourners through grief. Distress should grip us when those we love with all our might, fall. How the mighty have fallen.

In this sermon series I keep ringing the bell that David prefigures Jesus. You might wonder how this happens in 2 Samuel 1.

But remember Jesus in Gethsemane, and all the emotional complexity he bore under the shadow of the cross. Jesus was struck by grief, though it was a grief of a different kind. The sins of all the elect were about to be placed upon His shoulders. The Father would be filled with wrath, forsake Him, and for the first time in all eternity, there would be a separation between Father and Son. He would be the mighty to fall.

And yet, as Hebrews 12:2 says, Jesus went to the cross for the joy set before Him. Glory lay on the other side of death: the redemption of a sinful people, with resounding praise and love from His Father, and a throne that would be forever His.

But in that garden, as Jesus considered the cup He must drink, He was in agony; overcome and unashamed of His sorrow and fear and great grief. He wanted his disciples to see it. He wanted us to know about it.

And yet, it was precisely because He did drink that cup, that He did go to the cross and face God’s wrath on our behalf, that the mighty need not fall. For Jesus’ death was swallowed in victory when he defeated a foe far greater than Amalekites and Philistines: When He defeated death. Now His resurrected life – eternal life – is available to all who believe.

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”

-John 11:25-26

Death no longer has the final say. The mighty may fall, but yet shall they live. For the mighty among men are those that have happily admitted their weakness, their sins and their failures before God, and God has made them mighty. He makes us mighty, forever, unfailing and unfading!

Yes. There is a time for mourning. Embrace the flood of sorrow, just as David did. But there is coming a time to rejoice. Rejoice that those who die in Christ, live. Rejoice that when death comes to you, that we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. -1 Corinthians 15:51-57

Church, we grieve together and we rejoice together, we sing and we weep. We remember the loss and we remember God’s promises, and these we must remember together.

And when the time of mourning is satisfied, we prepare for action, and take back what the enemy has stolen! It’s what we will see David do in the coming chapters.

How fitting it is – for David, for Jesus, for us – that before crowns there most come mourning.

1Brueggemann, W. (1990). First and Second Samuel. Pg 211. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press.