David, the shepherd boy, is watching his father’s sheep.
They are pasturing on the very hills where afterward a Lamb was born of which you have heard much--“the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”
David, the shepherd boy, was beautiful, brave, musical and poetic. I think he often forgot the sheep in his reveries. There in the solitude he struck the harp-string that is thrilling through all ages. David the boy was at work gathering the material for David the poet and for David the man.
Like other boys, David was fond of using his knife among the saplings, and he had noticed the exuding of the juice of the tree; and when he became a man he said: “The trees of the Lord are full of sap.”
David the boy, like other boys, had been fond of hunting the birds’ nests, and he had driven the old stork off the nest to find how many eggs were under her; and when he became a man he said: “As for the stork, the fir trees are her house.”
In boyhood he had heard the terrific thunder storm that frightened the red deer into premature sickness; and when he became a man he said: “The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve.”
David the boy had lain upon his back, looking up at the stars and examining the sky, and to his boyish imagination the sky seemed like a piece of divine embroidery, the divine fingers working in the threads of light and the beads of stars; and when he grew up he wrote:
“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers.”
When he became an old man, thinking of the goodness of God, he seemed to hear again the bleating of his father’s sheep across many years, and to think of the time when he tended them on the Bethlehem hills, and he cries out: “The Lord is my shepherd.”
There is one scene in the life of David that you may not have pondered.
You have seen him with a harp, playing the devil out of Saul; with a sling, smashing the skull of Goliath; with a sword, hacking to pieces the Philistines; with a scepter, ruling a vast realm; with a psalm, gathering all nations into doxology.
But now we have David playing the fool.
He has been anointed king, yet he is in exile and is passing incognito among the Gathites. They are beginning to suspect who he is, and they say:
“I wonder if this is not the warrior, King David? It looks like him. Is not this the man about whom they used to make poetry, and about whom they composed a dance, so that the maidens of the city, reeling now on one foot and now on the other, used to sing: ‘Saul has slain his thousands, but David has slain his tens of thousands’? Yes, he is very much like David; he must be David; he is David.”
David, to escape their hands, pretends to be demented; and he said within himself:
“If I act crazily, then these people will not injure me. No one would be so much of a coward as to assault a madman.”
So, one day, while these Gathites are watching King David with increased suspicion, they see him standing by the door, running his hands meaninglessly up and down the panels--scrabbling on the door as though he would climb up, his mouth wide open, drooling like an infant.
I suppose the boys of the streets threw missiles at him, but the sober people of the town said:
“This is not fair. Do you not see that he has lost his reason? Do not touch this madman. Hands off! Hands off!”
So David escaped. But what an exhibition he made of himself before all the ages!
There was a majesty in King Lear’s madness after Regan and Goneril, his daughters, had persuaded him to banish their sister, Cordelia, and all the friends of the drama have been thrilled with that spectacle.
The craziness of Meg Merrilies was weird and imposing, and formed the most telling passage in Sir Walter Scott’s “Guy Mannering.”
There was a fascination about the insanity of Alexander Cruden, who made the best concordance of the Bible that the world ever saw--made it between the mad houses.
But there was nothing grand, nothing weird, nothing majestic, nothing sublime about this simulation on the part of David. Instead of trusting in the Lord, as he had trusted on other occasions, he gathers before him a vast audience of all generations that were to come, and, standing on that conspicuous stage of history, in view of all the ages, he impersonates the slavering idiot.
Taking the behavior of David as a suggestion, I wish to show you how many of the wise, the brave and the regal sometimes play the fool. Those men as badly play the fool as did David who, in any crisis of life, take their case out of the hand of God.
David, in this case, acted as though there were no God to lift him out of the predicament. What a contrast between his behavior, when this brave little man stood up in front of the giant ten feet in height, looking into his face, and this time, when he debased himself and bedraggled his manhood by affecting insanity in order that he might escape from the grip of the Gathites! In the one case, he played the hero; in the other case, he played the fool.