David's Death Song : Part 1

True Words for Brave Men
by Rev. Charles Kingsley

(Page 12 of 19)

"And David spoke unto the Lord the words of this song in the day that the Lord had delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies, and out of the hand of Saul: And he said, The Lord is my rock, and my fortress and my deliverer; the God of my rock; in him will I trust: he is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my Savior; they saved me from violence." - 2 Sam. xxii. 1-3.

This is the death song of David; the last words of the great man - warrior, statesman, king, poet, prophet. A man of many joys and many sorrows, many virtues, and many crimes; but through them all, every inch a man. A man - heaped by God with every gift of body, and mind, and heart, and especially with strong and deep intense feeling. Right or wrong, he is never hard, never shallow, never light-minded. He is in earnest. Whatever happens to him, for good or evil, goes to his heart, and fills his whole soul, till it comes out again in song.

This it is which makes David the Psalmist. This it is which makes the Psalter a text book still for every soldier or sailor, for all men who have human hearts in them. This it is which will make his psalms live for ever. Because they are full of humanity, of the spirit of man, awakened and enlightened, and ennobled, by the Spirit of God.

Looking through these psalms of David, one is struck with astonishment at their variety. At what is called the versatility of his mind, that is, his ability to turn himself to every kind of subject, as it comes before him, and to sing of it - as man has never sung since. And one is the more astonished, when one remembers that many of the most beautiful of these Psalms must have been written while David was still a very young man. Though we have them, of course, only in a translation - though many of the words and phrases in them are difficult, sometimes impossible to understand, though they were written in a kind of verse which would give our English ears no pleasure, and were set to a music so utterly different from our own, that it would not sound like music to us.

Yet, with all these disadvantages, they are beautiful as they stand, they sink into the ear, and into the heart, as what they are, the words of one inspired by God, who found beauty in every sight which he beheld, in every event which happened, even in every sorrow and every struggle in his own soul, and could sing of each and all of them in words and thoughts fresh from God, the fountain of all beauty and all truth.

But the peculiarity of David's psalms, after all, is from his intense faith in God. God is in all his thoughts. God is near him, guiding him, trying him, educating him, punishing him, sometimes he thinks for a moment, deserting him. But even then his mind is still full of God. It is God he wants, and the light of God's countenance, without which he cannot live, and leaving him in misery, and shame, and darkness, and out of the darkness he cries - My God, my God, why hast they forsaken me? And, therefore, everything which happens to him shapes itself not into mere poetry, but into a prayer, or a hymn.

It is this which has made David for Christians now, as well as for Jews of old, the great master and teacher of heart religion. In the early church, in the middle ages, as now, Catholic alike and Protestant, whosoever has feared God and sought after righteousness; whosoever has known and sorrowed over the sinfulness and weakness of his own heart; whosoever has believed that the Lord God was dealing with him as with a son, educating him, chastening him, purifying him and teaching him, by the chances and changes of his mortal life; whosoever, I say, has had any real taste of vital experimental religion - to David's Psalms he has gone, as to a treasure house, to find there his own feelings, his own doubts, his own joys, his own thoughts of God and His providence - reflected as in a glass; everything which he would say, said for him already, in words which will never be equaled on earth.

There are psalms among them of bitter agony, cries as of a lost child, like that 6th psalm - "Oh Lord, rebuke me not in Your anger, neither chasten me in Thy hot displeasure," &c. And yet ending like that, with a sudden flash of faith, and hope, and joy, which is a peculiar mark of David's character, faith in God triumphing over all the chances and changes of mortal life. "The Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping. The Lord will receive my prayer, all mine enemies shall be confounded and sore vexed. They shall be turned back and put to shame."

There are psalms again which are prayers for guidance and teaching like the 5th Psalm - "Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies: make thy way plain before my face."

There are psalms, again, of Natural Religion, such as the 8th and the 19th and the 29th, the words of a man who had watched and studied nature by day and night, as he kept his sheep upon the mountains, and wandered in the desert with his men. "I will consider thy heavens, the works of thy hand, the moon and the stars which they hast ordained . . . the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea" . . . (Ps. viii. 3-8). "The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament showed his handy-work" (Ps. xix. 1-6). "It is the Lord that commanded the water: it is the glorious God that made the thunder: it is the Lord that ruled the sea: the voice of the Lord broke the cedar trees: the voice of the Lord divided the flames of fire: the voice of the Lord shook the wilderness: the Lord sited above the water flood," &c. (Ps. xxix.).

There are psalms of deep religious experience like the 32d. - "Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven, and whose sin is covered . . . they art a place to hide me in. . . . Thy hand is heavy upon me day and night . . . I will acknowledge my sin unto Thee."

There are psalms, and these are almost the most important of all, such as the 9th, the 24th and 36th Psalms, which declare the providence and the kingdom of the Living God, with that great and prophetic 2d Psalm (ver. 1-5): "Why do the heathen so furiously rage together, and the people imagine vain things. The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord, and against his anointed," &c.

There are psalms of deep repentance, of the broken and the contrite heart, like that famous 51st Psalm, which is used in all Christian churches to this day, as the expression of all true repentance, and which, even in our translation, by its awful simplicity, its slow sadness, expresses in its very sound the utterly crushed and broken heart. "Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness, according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences. . . . Behold, I was shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive. . . . The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, they wilt not despise. . . ."

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & co., 1884.