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David’s family problems
By Mark Morgan | David
Children are born with faith. Without knowledge or strength of their own, they rely unquestioningly on others. As they mature with growing life experience, faith commonly fades, outshone by the glow of self-dependence and a confidence that human opinions are the best available. Faith – the certainty about what has not been personally experienced or cannot be directly proved – slowly trickles away. And so we arrive at adulthood where, for most people at least, personal and communal experiences or opinions become boundaries and limit the possibilities of life.
King David, however, avoided this decay and reached adulthood with his faith intact. For him, killing Goliath was not only possible but essential.
He also displayed amazing ability at a very early age. Ability often proves to be one of the greatest enemies of faith, prompting us to rely on our own ability instead of the vastly greater ability of God, our creator.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson sagely observed: “A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.”
Yet King David avoided this misleading folly also, arriving at the height of his formidable powers still certain of God’s supremacy.
No wonder he was Israel’s greatest king! No wonder he was successful.
However, rulership gives power and power is dangerous. All too often, power corrupts, and sadly for David, after ruling for about 10 glorious years, he plunged into serious error. For a time, it seems that he believed he was above the laws which governed the behaviour of everyone else in his kingdom. This is the danger of power. It appears that, for a time, David felt he was above Moses’ laws about marriage and fidelity. He saw Bathsheba, a married woman, bathing and took her as his own. In doing so, he was unfaithful to God as well as to all of his wives and concubines. He tried to cover it up, and when that failed, ordered the death of Uriah, one of the special heroes in David’s army and Bathsheba’s husband.
David then married Bathsheba before their illegitimate baby was born.
This was a series of disastrous mistake on David’s part. God was displeased, yet forgave the repentant king and did not insist on the death penalty specified for both murder and adultery. Yet he still promised punishment with two components: firstly, the baby would die, and secondly, trouble and the sword would ravage David’s family life from then on.
God’s punishment took place.
It is tragic that such a righteous man and outstanding example was unable to maintain that righteousness without failure.[1] This changed the course of David’s life and that of his family, but managing his family was already a very difficult task.
All choices we make – whether of careers, hobbies, friends, spouse, religion, education, diet, clothing, housework or anything else – have consequences. Not only so, but the choices we make in one arena of life will affect other areas as well.
It’s all about priorities, because we all get the same amount of time each week. If you choose to commit 100 hours per week to a job, then you only have 68 hours for sleep, eating, hygiene and all the other aspects of life. If you also allowed 8 hours of sleep each day, only 12 hours would remain each week for everything else you may have in life: friends, family, religion hobbies, housework, etc.
Of course, some responsibilities are optional:
If we don’t take up these optional responsibilities, we can commit much more time to the remaining responsibilities that are not optional. In the Bible, God tell us that we must fulfil these responsibilities to please him.
David was an excellent and godly king. As a teenage shepherd, he had risked his life fighting lions and bears to save his sheep; as king, he tried to care for his nation with the dedication. Yet one man caring for millions of people spread across a large kingdom is a far more complex task than looking after a “few sheep in the wilderness”.[2] A king relies on a hierarchy of subordinates to correctly report conditions in the kingdom while disseminating and enforcing policies. How else can a king decide his priorities or directions?
Ruling a nation will consume any amount of time a king is willing to commit to the task. Not only so, but the time demanded will always tend to increase and the call will be urgent.
A large family will also consume any amount of time a father or mother is willing to give, but many of the demands will not be so obviously immediate. A king has servants aplenty to handle the pressing day-to-day demands of children. In fact, history suggests that a king’s children are more often brought up by servants than by their parents. In a king’s family, one of those children will later become king.[3] Who will be this future king’s teacher, his tutor, his coach and mentor? Unfortunately, it is more likely to be a servant than his far-too-busy father. Typically, a successful king will not have time to pass on his expertise through personalised training of his sons.
What a calamity that the person best equipped to teach the skills needed to rule a kingdom will be too busy to do so! As a result, when a king dies, his successor begins his reign without the benefit of hands-on training from a successful monarch.
David was a godly king with the endless demands that naturally accompany such a position, but he also had the added responsibilities of being a father.
So how does a man like David handle these conflicting pressures?
Sadly, kings like David have an impossible balancing act to achieve. They must apportion their limited available time in the best way possible for the good of their kingdom. And what is the best balance anyway?
How do the needs of a king’s subjects – millions of people – weigh against the needs of his family? Ignoring his family will make it more likely that his successor will do a bad job. Prioritising the education of a successor seems vital, but is unlikely to appear urgent. I can’t speak for David, but I can’t help thinking that in his situation, I would look after the urgent matters of the kingdom, putting off training my replacement until I had more time. And that time would simply never come, because the demands of successfully ruling millions of people will always supply an unending parade of urgent matters! So which is better, to help millions today, or to provide personalised non-urgent training to a son?
Unfortunately, kings and other leaders always seem to get caught in this trap.
Jesus is often described as the son of David and will sit on the throne of his father David. David was a great king who left an unmatched national legacy, but his family was a mess, particularly after his sin with Bathsheba.
David had absolute power and could choose his own priorities. As with many kings before and since, one of his priorities was taking wives and concubines. The Bible gives us the names of eight wives[4] and mentions at least 10 concubines.[5] He may well have had more of each.
In the beginning, however, when God created one man, he created one woman also. The practice of taking more than one wife did not appear for several generations after creation.[6]
While we don’t read of any problems between David’s wives or concubines, there are several other family conflicts described.
For David, an emotional and musical worship of God was central to life. This is shown clearly in the Psalms, at least half of which were composed by David. It was also shown when he danced in public before God as the ark was brought into Jerusalem. This seems to have been no problem with God or the people, but David’s wife Michal, princess-daughter of Saul, considered it uncouth for a king to behave like that and told him so in no uncertain terms. David retorted that the common people would be pleased with his behaviour. The episode concludes with the sober reflection that Michal had no children for the rest of her life.
Some time later, the disastrous incident with Bathsheba brought God’s punishment on David and his family. After this, David’s greater and more painful problems began:
Looking at this long list of family problems, the consistent feature throughout is that David took very little positive action. After his sin with Bathsheba, David appears to have lost his confidence and moral authority. Perhaps he would have felt it hypocritical, or possibly God’s statement that he would have problems in his family left him unwilling to fight for the family he wanted. Perhaps he felt that would have been fighting against God. He still led by a godly example, but the commanding leadership was missing.
David was a great king and a wonderful example to all of his subjects – except in the matter of Uriah and Bathsheba.[7] However, after that failure, his leadership was only a shadow of what it had been.
As David relaxed late one afternoon, a sudden temptation changed the course of his kingship and mortally wounded his family. How quickly we can lose our moral direction if we are not eternally vigilant!
Take care.
Bible Tales article: David’s legacy
Bible Tales article: King David’s Family Tree
Bible Tales article: Harmony of Bible records of David’s life
King David (Wikipedia)
Notes
| ↑1 | Jesus is the only person who was righteous without fail and without sinning (regarding Jesus being sinless, see 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22; 1 John 3:5, while for everyone else, see Romans 3:23; 1 John 1:8-10). |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | 1 Samuel 17:28 |
| ↑3 | …or queen in some kingdoms, but not in the kingdom of Israel. |
| ↑4 | His first wife was Michal the daughter of King Saul (1 Samuel 18:27) while 2 Samuel 3:2-5 and 1 Chronicles 3:1-4 list Ahinoam, Abigail, Maacah, Haggith, Abital and Eglah. Bathsheba became his wife in 2 Samuel 11:26-27. |
| ↑5 | When king David’s son Absalom rebelled against his father, David fled Jerusalem, leaving 10 concubines to care for the palace (see 2 Samuel 15:16; 16:21-22; 20:3). |
| ↑6 | Jesus observes that the breaking up of marriages through divorce was the same – see Matthew 19:3-12 and Mark 10:2-12. |
| ↑7 | 1 Kings 15:5 |