2 Samuel 19:2

Victory Turned Into Mourning

"And the victory that day was turned into mourning." ( 2Sa 19:2 )

THE victory spoken of is a victory that was longed for, and yet when it came it was as intolerable as the sting of an adder. How is it that we are always wanting things, and often when we get them they are bitterness itself? We should think a little about this, and try to be wiser to-morrow than we are today. But this seems to be impossible. It would seem to be a kind of law of this rude and incoherent life of ours, that we must, in the majority of instances, play the fool.

David wanted to be rid of his enemies he was in this case challenged to vindicate his own throne. This was no fight of his own forcing he was obliged to meet the insubordination and the revolt of his own son. All his arrangements were made, and the king, half hoping, half fearing, living that divided life of ours of which we never can get the two parts wholly together, was waiting at home. Messengers came: he wanted to see them he hated their very shadow: he longed for them he could have cursed them. He watched their eyes and their lips ere yet they fully came into his presence. He could have bribed them to tell lies, and yet he must hear the truth: he wants to know the fact, and yet he would have given half his kingdom if he could make that fact correspond with his own wishes. Strange life sad, tragic, comic, wild, multitudinous, unmanageable: and that life is ours, if it be other than a superficial existence, a throb, and a flutter without solemnity and completeness. The messengers came to the king, and they told David that his enemies had been overcome: he might now be at rest the troublers of his kingdom were, for the time being at least, despoiled, and were able no long to trouble the good king's reign. "And," said he, "the young man...?" "The young man? The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is." "And the king was much moved." Is a king a man? Is the humanity deeper than the officialism? Do Pharaoh's daughters weep? Does a lump come into a queen's throat when she hears her children prayed for? "The king was much moved." There is a time when our crowns are baubles, when our furniture and stablings, and estates trouble us and hurt us and disquiet us and mock us by their very brilliance and value. "And he went up to the chamber over the gate and wept." Sometimes that is all a man wants just room enough to cry in, for his is a broken heart, the world is a deceitful place, time is a liar, victories are defeats. And as he went, not after he had gotten to the place, but on the road, when he did not mean to do it, and he wanted nobody to hear him, on the road he broke down and said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" Not the traitor, not the revolter the son still: and it is just so with us and the great Father-King. He might call us rebels, revolters, anarchists, leaders of rebellion, heads of confusion, traitors unfit to live: but that infinite heart of his finds better expression in tender words and kind speeches; and pathos deeper than our mother's pity.

David, mighty king you wanted to be rid of your enemies: they are dead: how now? "Yes," said he, "I wanted to be rid of my enemies, but not in that way." There it is again it is always in some other way that we want our desire granted. "The end is good, that is to say, it is exactly what I wanted: my enemies are cleared out of the field, the clouds have gone from round about my throne, my kingdom is now established in peace and quietness but there is a great emptiness in the house, a feeling of awful hollowness in the kingdom, for my troubling son, but son still, is killed." You want to get clear of that son of yours? You don't. And you have said how much you would give if he were only out of the way. But all the while you made a great fatherly reservation when you said so, and a great motherly emphasis unexpressed was in your heart when you talked about his being out of the way. You meant somewhere more comfortable, more useful, more happy. You did not mean out of the way in any tragic sense. O strange man wild, tumultuous life. We want, and we don't want; we pray, and we don't want the answer, at least, not so but thus, a crooked answer to a straight request. We want the man to hear our curses on his deeds, and yet we would be the first to put out both hands to save him from the smiting lightning. How is that? Bethink you whether it is not better to keep some troubles, than to have some joys, and let us say whether it is not better for our souls' health to keep the ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of. We want to be rid of our pains and troubles and difficulties, and the Lord will not remove them; he knows that if they were gone, something worse would come in their place, so he quiets us by saying, "What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter. This is very humbling to thee and trying, and I know this affliction bites clean through to the bone, yea, and toucheth the very marrow itself, and I know this shadow makes even June's longest day a kind of night in thy soul but 'tis well for thee: better than thou dost suppose; pray on, hope on, the end will explain the road." If we could accept this word and rest in it, we should be wise, and pious, and true but the flesh, our vanity, our incomplete nature will not do so, and thus we are afflicting ourselves with rods the Lord never intended us to use upon our poor lives.

We are all trying for victory. See if that be not true. Every man, even the poorest, is aiming at some kind of victory in life. Think if this be not so, father, mother, child, man of business, man of letters, boy challenging schoolmate to a marble encounter through and through life, every section of it, we are trying in some way to get the promised end. Life is a competitive examination from the moment we can put two words together to the moment when we lay down the old man's staff for the last time.

But we are taught here that there are occasions upon which the victory is not worth winning. Is that not so in most cases? What do men want? One says: Riches. He heapeth up riches and knoweth not who shall gather them is the victory worth the winning? Another says: Well, I want to conquer that human heart, and make it mine man's heart, woman's heart saith the young. Is it worth doing? It may be, it may not be. I want that apple on the bough above not that one, but the one higher. Is it worth fetching a ladder for? Try: you get it, but the worm had it first, and you spurn it with keen disappointment from your hand. It is well, therefore, for men before they go out to battle, to answer the question if I win, is it worth doing? because there are victories that are defeats, there are triumphs that are stings, there are achievements that have nothing in them but graves and horrors and mockeries.

Shall we say, without any desire to be too gloomy, that there is nothing upon earth out of God, out of Christ, that is worth doing, worth having? Once we did not think so, and no book could have so taught us, and no preacher, fervent in exhortation, could have forced it upon us: we should have called him dyspeptic, mistaken: but we know it now. And yet the very things that in themselves are not worth having, may, when used in the spirit of Christ, and enjoyed under the responsibility of personal stewardship to God, become pleasures, satisfactions, joys, means of good, means of usefulness to others. Solomon was right we did not think so at the time, but we have lived to reverse our judgment when he said, after having swept the curriculum of the university of time and the university of the devil, "Vanity of vanities a veering, veering, hollow wind, saith the preacher." David felt on the day to which the text refers that some victories may be bought too dearly. Why, if you have paid too much for the house you live in, you feel as if you had a controversy with the walls, and feel half ashamed of the place. It is even so with some victories: we may be paying too much for them. Here is a man who is determined to achieve his end. He boasts that he never yet did fail to carry out his purpose. It is a fool's boast that, parenthetically but he has come to a strait place where progress is difficult: to a turnstile, and there is a severe overlooker, and the overlooker says, "What you pay to go through here is honour." "Nothing less?" "Nothing." "Take it." He is through, he will come back no more he has gone through into a wilderness, trackless, boundless, into which, if a man get, he can never come out again.

You are determined to carry your point in business, in the school, in the church, in the street you will realise your point, and you have now reached a very particularly critical spot. Can you get through there? No. Under it? No. Over it? No. Something must be done before you can move. The devil keeps the stile, and you say, "What is it that you demand of passers by?" And the answer is, "Conscience. We take souls here. Silver and gold, none of it: every man passing this counter lays down his soul." "His soul?" say you in reproachful soliloquy. "It is a high price. May I not go through for less?" "Not a whit." Some one behind touches you on the shoulder and says "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" You call him a fanatical preacher, an embodiment of the sentimental conditions of life you say, "That is very well in theory, and if this had been Sunday and this a church I could have listened to you for decency's sake; but I am on the road to my purpose, to my victory, and I must have it. Here------" and the price is paid. Well, you have carried your point; was it worth carrying? The great difficulty is this, that a man does not know how much he has paid until he has really got hold of his victory, and felt how comparatively valueless it is. Could we have had a short trial trip over the lines of life, it might have been well for some of us, but there are no trial trips, no rehearsals of this great drama you go in and do what you can. Could I have had some twenty years' preliminary experience before beginning life in earnest, some say, there had been fewer blots upon the page, fewer crookednesses in the line: I should have done better. But there is no such rehearsal permitted in the government of God. You began at the cradle; you pass on to the tomb. Where the tree falls it must lie for ever. It fell there and no help can change it. And thou, poor scribbler, throwing down thy pen, without Christ, can only say, "What is writ, is writ would it were worthier." Seeing, therefore, that we are well warned there is no rehearsal, no preliminary trial or testing of life, but that it is a solemn transaction, complete in itself, and only to be performed once for all, it becomes us to think which is the right end of things, which is the right key in which to set life, what are the things worth doing and what are the things, how tempting soever, that are not worth accomplishing. It is the purpose of the Church, it is the business of the ministry, it is the object of Christ, it is the mission of the Holy Ghost to teach these things, and surely we need to learn them.

Are there any victories that cannot be turned into mourning? Blessed be God, there are victories that are followed by no compunction, no humiliation blessings that have no sorrow in them. What is your complaint before God? What is the disease that is poisoning your blood, and burning in your marrow, and consuming your soul your own peculiar disease? Jealousy? Conquer it by the Spirit of God, pray about it, shut thyself up long months and have it out with heaven. This kind cometh not out but by prayer and fasting, prayer a month long, fasting to the point of famine. Though thou go into thy religious solitude a young man thirty, and dost come out a month after, an old man seventy, if thou canst say, "God has enabled me to strangle the serpent, to tear its fang out of its throat and thrust it into eternal flames;" thou shalt have no mourning it will be a victory for ever, unimpaired, complete, full of joyous self-content.

What is thy disease, thou who dost say that jealousy is no element in thy constitution what is thy plague? Self-indulgence, self-gratification, self-delight self, self, self, morning, noon, and night none beside only myself: I alone, I am the world, think of me, comfort me, let me have my way, satisfy my want is the key of thy life so struck? Conquer thyself. "If any man would be my disciple," saith Christ, "let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, not periodically, not with occasional heroism, but with steady, constant self-crucifixion, and let him follow me." You have gone out to the battle; we will wait for you; you come back older, yet younger; bruised, yet healed with immortality, shaken, yet firm as a rock. You say, "Let others be thought of." If you say it not, so much the better, if you but do it. Men will take notice of you, who have known you aforetime, that there is a deeper gentleness in your spirit than they ever suspected before, a larger charity, a nobler feeling, a more lovely willingness to give way and concede, and they will own possibly that even you may have a new heart. Hast thou won that battle? There is no other battle to be won; fight yourself beat yourself set the standard of a new being upon the fortressess and citadels of your own obstinacy, and then you may beat your sword into a plough-share, and make a pruning-hook of your spear, for in your case there is no more war to be done.

How is all this to be accomplished? some poor earnest soul may ask. The answer is as complete as the question is earnest and emphatic. "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." They are poor victories that are wrought by the hands: other hands may overcome these, and turn them into defeats. Moral victories, spiritual triumphs, accomplishments of the soul through the patience and might of Christ these abide. Time writes no wrinkles on their brow they are fair with immortal youth. Lord, increase our faith. It is by faith we overcome the present, and the present truly is the great enemy and besieger of our souls, simply because it is the present: it is so near, so large, so clamorous, so importunate: all its supposed blessings are here on the spot, and are offered instantaneously and not having far and keen outlook over things boundless, we may be tempted to snatch the immediate prize. Then shall our eyes be opened, and we shall flee away from the light because we are ashamed.

We sometimes celebrate a mourning that shall be turned into victory, even the mourning of Christ, the crucified Man, who said, "My soul is troubled, even unto death. Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" These are the words of mourning. "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth Go ye therefore, and teach all nations." These are the words of victory. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted."

Unless we have known the bitterness of this mourning we never can know the joy of true victory. If we examine the keenest, the most solid joys of life, we shall find that they go back into shadow, melancholy, gloom, and Gethsemane. Other joys are external, flippant, momentary: "snowflakes on the river a moment seen and gone for ever." Have no joy that is not shaded with a mysterious melancholy: highest joys touch the profoundest sensitiveness; it is hardly to be distinguished as to where one ends and the other begins. There is a mourning that hath no joy, there is a mourning that seems to be joy at its very climax, its highest point an acme point.

Are you crucified with Christ? You shall rise with him. Have you known the fellowship of his sufferings? You shall know the power of his resurrection. If we suffer we shall also reign with him. You want the enjoyment without the suffering, you cannot have it; this is God's law, it is out of agony we pluck our keenest joys. If you have godly sorrow which worketh repentance, it will not need to be repented of, it will end in joy unspeakable and full of glory. Are you in deep distress of soul? I will not sympathise with you in the sense of wishing that distress less: I wish that distress to get deeper, more complete, to include your life of life, every drop of your rebellious blood, and then I have a gospel for you; I shall be as an angel breaking through the midnight gloom, singing to you on the plains of your distress, "Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, goodwill toward men. I bring you good tidings of great joy, a Christ-day, that shall turn your mourning into joy. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, for he hath sent me to proclaim liberty to the captive, the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, to appoint a feast for those afflicted with famine, and to give the oil of gladness for the ashes of mourning." This is what the gospel has to do in the world: it cannot do more, for this is pardon, this is heaven.

Selected Note

David's fondness for Absalom was unextinguished by all that had passed; and as he sat, awaiting tidings of the battle, at the gate of Mahanaim, he was probably more anxious to learn that his son lived, than that the battle was gained; and no sooner did he hear that Absalom was dead, than he retired to the chamber above the gate, to give vent to his paternal anguish. The victors as they returned, slunk into the town like criminals, when they heard the bitter wailings of the king: "O my son, Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" The consequences of this weakness not in his feeling, but in the inability to control it might have been most dangerous, had not Joab gone up to him, and after sharply rebuking him for thus discouraging those who had risked their lives in his cause, induced him to go down and cheer the returning warriors by his presence ( 2Sa 13:1 to 2Sa 19:8 ).