In spite of the misery Saul had caused David for over a
decade David eulogized Saul beautifully.
He required that the song he had written be taught throughout Judah as a
memorial to the man who had sought to kill him most of his adult life. It is thought that David was about eighteen
years old when he killed Goliath and met Jonathan and we know that he was
thirty when he began reigning as king. We
assume his stay at court as minstrel and military leader was relatively brief
so we believe it was about eleven years that Saul pursued David on Jonathan's
behalf. David, however, respected the
anointing of the man if not the man himself.
There is a point in the miniseries Band of Brothers when Captain Sobel
walks past Major Winters and fails to salute the man who took over his job and
surpassed him in rank and Winters responds, " We salute the rank, not the man." That was David's attitude towards Saul,
mingled with compassion and also his love for Saul's son Jonathan. His statement that Jonathan's "love to
me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women", again points us
towards the reality of true love, brotherly love. David loved both the man who was his enemy and
also the man who loved him.
I thought salvation was about faith and grace not about
works. Does this passage say the
opposite is true? Faith without works is
indeed no faith at all. Paul encapsulates
this nicely in Ephesians 2 - "For by grace you have been saved through
faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of
works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in
them." James said that faith without
works is dead. We are to become new
people and that should have some tangible result in our lives. Jesus came to earth to show us how to
"be" not simply how to believe.
After faith comes we have a new life to live and that life should be a
testimony to the indwelling of the Spirit that led Jesus to reach out and
incarnate the Word to the world. Loving God
and loving your neighbor isn't simply feeling well disposed towards them, it is
active service.
We live in a culture that is at least haunted by Christian
morality and ethics if not so in fact. Because
of the influence of Christian teaching over the past two thousand years and the
dominance of that teaching in American culture for our entire history, we don’t
see anything particularly extraordinary about the values Paul advocates
here. In his own culture and
particularly in the pagan and Roman culture to which he writes, these were
virtues and values that were antithetical to prevailing thought and
practice. The way to get ahead was not to
associate with people of lower rank but higher, social climbing was
expected. Wisdom was to be prized not
humility. Being served was the goal, not
serving. Leaving vengeance to the Lord
rather than avenging yourself was silly.
Loving your enemy not just in your heart but in practical ways was a
ridiculous idea no one could possibly advocate.
Paul was espousing a countercultural set of principles on these people
and expecting them to follow in spite of their impulses to do otherwise and in
spite of the fact that the culture wouldn't applaud them for doing so. Oh, wait, while our culture might know these
values we don't seem to practice them, perhaps they convict us today as well.
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