CHAPTER XIV
Gaining the Kingdom
I and II Samuel
Agnes M. Lawson
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The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
Again in
Saul and David we have the symbol,
ubiquitous in Hebrew history, of the
rejection of the elder and the acceptance
of the younger. Saul compromises with the
enemies of his country; and keeps part of
the spoil which he uses as a sacrifice.
Subtle mortal man thus persuades himself
that “the end justifies the
means.” No end, however, in the
spiritual world is gained by compromise;
man cannot bargain with principles, he
must undeviatingly obey them. Nor can any
sacrifice be made to Jehovah in lieu of
the absolute obedience that he demands.
Samuel, the prophet, is unyielding and
uncompromising, and unflinchingly says to
the king: “Hath the Lord as great
delight in burnt offerings and
sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of
the Lord? He hath also rejected thee from
being king.”
Saul is
unworthy of the kingdom, but one must be
found who is worthy of it and it is
Samuel’s work to find him. Great
trusts carry great responsibilities with
them, and Samuel waits for the Lord to
tell him whom to anoint. The chosen one
is David (beloved), son of Jesse, who
keeps his father’s sheep. From
Bethlehem (house of bread) comes David
the king, apex of Israel’s national
power, and Jesus (salvation), climax of
her spiritual power. From whence could
they have come but from Divine Substance?
And the shepherd who guards his
father’s sheep so carefully that
with his own hand he slays the lion and
the bear which menace their lives, is he
not the type of the Good Shepherd? Of Him
who said: “I am the good shepherd,
the good shepherd layeth down his life
for his sheep. He that is a hireling and
not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are
not, beholdeth the wolf coming, and
leaveth the sheep, and fleeth, and the
wolf snatcheth them and scattereth them:
he fleeth because he is a hireling, and
careth not for the sheep. I am the good
shepherd; and I know mine own, and mine
own know me, even as the Father knoweth
me and I know the Father; and I lay down
my life for my sheep.”
Saul’s
sin results in insanity, the consequence
of sin. We leave sanity, the basis of
right thinking and acting, to sin.
“Whosoever sinneth is the
bond-servant of sin,” and forgets
the chains which bind him. The penalty of
sin is the reaction or recoil of the sin
upon the sinner. Penalty grows on the
same stalk with sin and cannot be
separated from it, it is its consequence.
Sin and penalties are temporal, however,
Love watches over all. David is brought
to the court of Saul as a musician who
can exorcise the evil spirit. Out under
the vast dome of the arched sky, he has
learned to think and to translate thought
into music. So David plays his harp
before Saul, “who was refreshed,
and was well and the evil spirit departed
from him.”
“The
universe has been created and is
sustained by a musical law.” The
sinner is out of harmony and he must be
restored to it. Life is one vast symphony
and each, from the least to the greatest,
has his place in the orchestration. Life
is all music, if the notes are struck
correctly. Sanity is the ability to
strike those notes clearly, powerfully
and definitely. Insanity is discordant
and perverted thinking. Music is the
expression of the musician, and David,
the beloved, was under contract to the
universe to give out what had been so
freely given him. He loved Saul and
through his music flowed that which makes
the harmony of the spheres. Love is good
will, and the only healer. Nothing can
express love in the same degree as music.
It is the soul’s own language and
should be used in therapeutics more
universally than it is now. It is the
most refined and spiritualizing of all
the arts and spiritual ideas can be
expressed through music as in no other
art.
The elder
brothers of David are in Saul’s
army; and their father sends his youngest
son with provisions to his brothers and
presents to their officers. When David
arrives at the camp, the Israelites are
encamped on one hill, and opposite them
on another hill is the Philistine army.
Into the valley between them Goliath,
champion of the Philistines, presents
himself daily. His “height was six
cubits and a span, and he had an helmet
upon his head and he was clad in a coat
of mail.” This giant cries to the
armies of Israel: “Why are ye come
to set your battle in array? Am not I a
Philistine, and ye the servants of Saul?
Choose ye a man for you, and let him come
down to me. If he be able to fight with
me and kill me, then will we be your
servants; but if I prevail against him,
then shall ye be our servants and serve
us. I defy the armies of Israel this day.
Give me a man that we may fight
together.”
No man in
the camp has dared to accept this
challenge, until David arrives. He says
to Saul: “Let no man’s heart
fail because of him; thy servant will go
and fight this Philistine.” He puts
off him the armor of Saul, which the king
has placed on him and which would mean
defeat; for who can prove another’s
armor? He who accomplishes must conquer
by his own methods and be sheathed in his
own armor of conscious power. He only is
invulnerable who is clothed in the power
which he can gain from no man, but is
inherent within himself. David believes
in God; he believes in himself; and he
believes in the righteousness of his
cause; thus armed, he determines to
accept the challenge of the
Philistine.
In the
sublime audacity of youth, the stronger
for his inexperience--for every
experience in which we have been defeated
weakens us--David goes forth to meet
Goliath in his own armor, a
shepherd’s scrip and sling, and
sends a stone crushing into the forehead
of his opponent. The way to success must
be original; failure and mediocrity are
the results of trying to win by the alien
methods of others. Each soul is not only
a distinct individual; it has its own
distinct work, and inherent within it its
own method of doing that work. “The
fault lies not in our stars but in
ourselves that we are underlings.”
And this fault lies in the fact that we
endeavor to do our work weighted down
with the unproved armor of another, and
close our eyes to the fact that only in
our own original thought are we equipped
to meet the requirements of our own
work.
Goliath (an
exile), the Philistine (an emigrant), is
the great braggart who presents himself
daily before us and defies us. This exile
emigrant from nowhere is brazenly
standing between us and our birthright;
his modern name is Finite Sense. It is
only in our own spiritual insight that we
can meet him, and send crashing into his
forehead the words of divine Truth. Each
has his own work and there is a spiritual
tie connecting one with the work that is
his to do. The key of another will not
open my door. There is a legend of a
musical instrument which stood in an old
baronial hall. It had become disordered,
and though many had tried to repair it,
they were without success. But there came
one day to the castle the man who was the
maker of the instrument. With loving care
and skill, he set right that which was
wrong, and again the instrument gave
forth music that charmed the life and
inspired the soul.
The crown of
life is only given to him that
overcometh, and each must slay his own
Goliath, the limiting, hampering,
defeating mortal thought. Each must
adjust the strings of his own instrument,
and release the music of his own soul.
Daily and hourly will Goliath challenge
us, until, like David, we go out and meet
this Philistine, clothed in our conscious
knowledge of Truth, and slay him with his
own sword. Evil is self-destructive, its
own sword slays it. It is impossible to
compromise with Goliath, either we slay
him or he slays us. Warfare with him is
self-defense.
In
“Self Reliance,” Emerson
says: “Let the stoic arise who
shall reveal the resources of man, and
tell men that they are not leaning
willows, but can and must detach
themselves; that with the exercise of
self-trust, new powers shall appear; that
a man is the word made flesh, born to
shed healing to the nations, that he
should be ashamed of our compassion, and
the moment he acts for himself, tossing
the laws, the idolatries out of the
window, we pity him no more but thank and
revere him, and that teacher shall
restore the life of man to splendor, and
make his name dear to all
history.”
Other tests
await David. He must meet the jealousy of
Saul; and more subtle still, the
adulation of the people. Many a man has
accomplished the heroic deed, only to
fall under the seductive guile of his own
vanity, when the plaudits of the
multitude ring in his ears. And only the
love that is tested to the uttermost, and
weakens not under the severest strain is
real. Saul’s malady reaches an
acute stage when the multitude sings:
”Saul has slain his
thousands,
And David has slain his ten
thousands.”
Still,
“David played with his hand, as he
did day by day; and Saul had his spear in
his hand. And Saul cast his spear for he
said: “I will smite David even to
the wall.” But “David behaved
wisely in all his ways; and the Lord was
with him. All Israel and Judah loved
David; for he went out and came in before
them.”
The charm
and personal popularity is David’s;
and what can this be but love sent out in
large measure from the soul, and
returning upon it a gracious benediction?
He is always one of the people even
though he marries the king’s
daughter. All beautiful lives have their
secret; and David could say as did
another when asked the secret of his
power, “I had a friend.”
Saul’s son loved David, “The
soul of Jonathan was knit with that of
David, and Jonathan loved David as his
own soul.”
The story of
Jonathan’s friendship for David is
one of the most inspiring pieces of
literature of all time. Without the
absolute love and trust of another in
him, man never makes the supreme stand;
for the soul requires this stimulus to
grow to that state of consciousness which
is fixed and unswerving. We grow out into
another’s faith in us; as the
flower grows out to greet the sunshine.
“Whenever God makes a great man he
confides the secret to another,” is
a poetic way of stating the fact that the
faith and love of a friend ennobles a
soul and brings it out on the mountain
top of greatness.
As One later
gives up his life for his friends,
Jonathan gives up a throne for his
friend. Friendship has its own throne,
but it is not of “this
world,” it is of that other eternal
in the heavens, for friendship is
immortal. Jonathan’s love never
falters when David, driven away by
Saul’s jealousy, becomes a
freebooter for years. During this time
Saul’s life is twice in
David’s power, but he holds true to
his course, and spares the king’s
life. Did not he who came from the house
of David a millennium later say in his
greatest discourse: “For if ye love
them which love you, what reward have ye?
do not even the publicans the same? Love
your enemies, bless them that curse you,
do good to them that hate you, and pray
for them which despitefully use you and
persecute you; that ye may be children of
your Father which is in
heaven”?
The
following estimate of David is from the
pen of Richard Moulton, in “The
Modern Reader’s Bible.”
“The personality of David is
perhaps the most splendid in all history.
He is the warrior of Israel, the founder
of the monarchy from which all kings
trace their reigns. He is equally the
center of Hebrew poetry, with whose name
both earlier and later song is associated
in the book of Psalms. He is the inventor
in musical art; whereas the Greeks never
learned the art of combining lyre and
flute, David’s orchestra of
cornets, trumpets, cymbals, psalteries,
and harps shows the union of strings,
wind and percussion, which is supposed to
constitute the distinctiveness of modern
music. With him is associated whatever
else of art is permitted to the Hebrews;
the architecture of Solomon’s
temple is designed by his father, and he
establishes the courses of sacred ritual
which constitute Israel’s highest
art. And all this splendor of achievement
is crowned with a personality that is
intensely human, and lovable in all human
relationships.”
Jonathan and
three of his brothers were slain in a
battle with the Philistines. The
misdirected life of Saul ends at the same
time when he falls on his own sword and
dies. In David’s Lament, which is
undoubtedly from his own pen, we feel a
love that is not only human but
super-human; from one who has been
touched with the divine. David had been
weighed in the balance and not found
wanting; he had served up to the kingdom
and it could not be kept from him.
DAVID’S LAMENT
Thy
glory, O Israel,
Is slain upon thy high places!
How are the mighty--
Fallen.
Tell it not in Gath,
Publish it not in the streets of
Askelon;
Lest the daughters of the Philistines
rejoice,
Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised
triumph.
From the blood of the slain,
From the fat of the mighty,
The bow of Jonathan turned not
back,
And the sword of Saul returned not
empty.
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and
pleasant in their lives,
And in their death they were not
divided;
They were swifter than eagles,
They were stronger than lions.
Ye daughters of Israel,
Weep over Saul,
Who clothed you in scarlet
delicately,
Who put ornaments upon your
apparel.
I am distressed for thee, my brother
Jonathan,
Very pleasant has thou been unto
me:
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women.
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