...and he became captain over them.

 

Monday, July 3, 2023


Psalm 9

1 Samuel 21:8-22:5

Acts 14:1-7


Observance: Thomas, apostle and martyr [If not observed on December 21]


...and he became captain over them.


When I was a teenager in high school, I used to look at all the fathers and wonder what went wrong in the years between adolescence and fatherhood that caused them to dress the way they did. How could a man go from caring so much about the finer details of basketball shoes, haircuts and logos on t-shirts, to leaving the house with a short back and sides and clothes from the discount rack at the same shop that sells crockery and hardware? Now that I am beginning to cross that divide, it is becoming clearer that there is indeed something to be said about “dad fashion”. There is something that happens in the brain when one is responsible for the raising of a child, where the discovery is made that to be aggressively anti-fashion is actually the height of fashion.


Pride is ridiculous. It is absolutely silly. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the eye that sees pride is glossy, lazy, and points one way: inwards. No-one else sees (or cares about) what the prideful eye does.


David’s escape from pride was more of a forceful eviction. In forming David for kingship, God had to prune off the fruitless branches. Raving like a madman, David’s only concern was for survival. When compared with life and self-preservation, pride is less than worthless: it becomes a hindrance.


Rejected even from the possibility of living falsely as a local lunatic, David was driven to a cave. If this isn’t rock-bottom, I don’t know what is. But this is the exact place where God was happy to begin working a miracle: having sent David into the deep, God is now going to bring David back up again in a way that will strengthen him for what is to come, and finally be able to deliver to God’s chosen people a king after God’s own heart. As the emphasis to this point, the seeds of David’s new royal court are a bunch of outcasts, misfits and revolutionaries.


If David is a “type” of Christ – our perfect king – then we can be proud of our Captain. That Jesus has taken the motley crew that is today’s church and told us to go out and build His kingdom doesn’t say so much about our failings; rather, it points to the amazing glory of Christ’s ability to work miracles.

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