2 Samuel 3:10

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"To translate the kingdom." 2 Samuel 3:10 .

That is to say, to hand over the kingdom from one man to another. The kingdom was to pass from the house of Saul to the house of David, and David was to be king "over Israel and over Judah, from Dan even to Beersheba." The thought is that kingdoms of an earthly kind change hands, and therefore they are to be regarded as belonging to things temporary and mutable, and not to things eternal and unchangeable. What hast thou that thou hast not received? The kingdom did not belong to Saul, except in a secondary sense, for God still retained the kingdom in his own hands; he setteth up, and he bringeth down; he creates the prince, and he sets the beggar in his lowly place. By long use men come to entertain the idea of sole proprietorship, and thus the sense of monopoly increases. Our children are not ours, they are God's; our lives are not our own, they belong to the Creator; we have nothing, except in the sense of stewardship and in the sense of involving responsibility for the use we make of it. Blessed is he who can say, amid the transition of kingdom and influence of every name and kind, "He must increase, but I must decrease." It is well that men can only reign for a certain time; it would be well if royalty could change its point of origin, so that human vanity might be checked and human ambition might be baffled in many a course. We are not to think of earthly kingdoms alone as meaning political sovereignties; we are to think of personal influence, institutional functions, and all arrangements made to meet the necessity of the present day: all these things must be changed in order to be purified; the direction may be altered in order that attention may be wakened; those who imagine themselves secure for ever must be shaken out of their security, that they may learn that there is no permanence but in God. The Lord reigneth. All men reign under him, and are subject to his will. They only are happy who use the world as not abusing it, and who hold it with so light a hand that at any moment they can lay it down again.