Episode Details

No White Hats

2 Samuel 19; Remsen Bible Fellowship; 10/30/2022

Introduction

I grew up watching a lot of B-movie cowboy films from the 1930s. We were huge John Wayne fans in our house, and while most people know him from roles in movies like McLintock!, The Searchers, or True Grit, we were familiar with a whole extra section of his catalog. Randy Rides Alone, Blue Steel, and Riders of Destiny were some of the ones we matched time and again. One of the interesting things about those John Waybe movies is that they often broke the mold of 1930s cowboy movies in this important respect: the good guy often wears a black hat. If you turn on a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers film from the next decade you’ll notice that all the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats. This simple costume device removed all question of who was a good guy and who was a bad guy. Just look at the hat.

And while movies don’t use that particular device anymore, our society still does. We want to split people into two groups. Good and Evil. There’s a sense in which God does divide people in such a way. Except the grouping goes like this: Evil (this includes everyone, including you and your team) and Good (which includes the Triune God. That’s it.). So good and evil actually aren’t the most helpful distinctions when trying to discern people. Rather, instead of trying to throw a label on a person and pretending to then know everything about them, we ought to try and understand people in our lives, and the characters in the stories we read, based on the actions and the fruit of their lives. And those actions and fruit can change from situation to situation, and they can change over time. What we find out in the Bible is that there really aren’t a bunch or white hats and black hats. Or maybe we could put it another way - there are white hats and black hats, but the characters seem to make a lot of wardrobe changes.

David is a character we traditionally think of in a white hat. But this far into 2 Samuel, we know that that hat doesn’t always fit his head very well. How about in chapter 19? Well, that’s complicated.

Overcome

In the opening verses of chapter 19, we find David right where we left him - sitting in Mahanaim, weeping over the death of his third-born son, Absalom.

19:1 It was told Joab, “Behold, the king is weeping and mourning for Absalom.” 2 So the victory that day was turned into mourning for all the people, for the people heard that day, “The king is grieving for his son.” 3 And the people stole into the city that day as people steal in who are ashamed when they flee in battle. 4 The king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud voice, “O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

In these verses, we find David giving himself over to his emotions. And we can have a lot of sympathy with that, can’t we? Just at a base level, we need to acknowledge that emotions, even very strong emotions, are a positive good; they are not something to be afraid of or run from. God gives us emotions as creatures made in his image. The book of Psalms - largely written by this emotional man, David - has been called the songbook of the soul.

And we can even see the justification in the particular sadness he is feeling at this juncture. His third born son has just been killed, his firstborn we know is already dead, and the second born has disappeared from the story, presumably dead as well. David is right to lament the tragedy of Absalom’s life and rebellion, he’s right to lament his death, and he’s even right to feel these things compounded in magnitude by his own failings as a father. David is right to weep. So when you weep, know that God does not condemn your tears. David writes in Psalm 56:8, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my