Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the President of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: If you have your Bibles, if you'll take those and turn if you will, I just want to read one brief passage, odd passage 2 Samuel chapter 1941 through 43 this is following the Absalom revolution.
Absalom captures Jerusalem. As you remember, David and his army flee, go into Judea. Absalom listens to the spy that David leaves there and pursues David into the Judean wilderness where he is subsequently slain by Joab.
And then David comes back across the Jordan and finds his throne again in Jerusalem. Just one minor note, a technical note, you might not pick up on it as reading.
David never ever has relations with those 10 concubines. You remember he leaves 10 concubines behind and to take care of the palace and Absalom inventions for his sister's molestation rapes all those 10. And the Bible just says and David never had relations with them again.
So he comes back to Jerusalem and as he's coming back, this happens. Verse 41:1941 and behold, all the men of Israel came to the king and said unto the king, why have our brethren, the men of Judah, stolen thee away, and have brought the king and his household and all David's men with him back over Jordan? And all the men of Judah answered the men of Israel, because the king is near of kin to us. Wherefore then be ye angry for this matter? Have we eaten all of the king's cost, or hath he given us any gifts? And the men of Israel answered the men of Judah and said, we have 10 parts in the king, and you have and we have therefore more right in David than you have. Why then did you despise us that you that our advice should not be first and been bringing back our king? And the words of the men of Judah were fiercer than the words of the men of Israel. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening and pray that you will illumine our hearts and minds that we may get a heart of wisdom in Jesus name.
Amen in this teaching tonight, the title of this whole series is the Life and Leadership of King David.
Tonight, more than any of the sessions, we're going to talk about the complexities the ups and downs of leadership, and that it doesn't change much the altitude and velocity at which one is leading.
When I was the university president, every now and again some kid would come and say, look, I'm pastoring a little church.
50 people, 70 people, something.
I just feel like God is calling me to be the pastor of a megachurch. Will you pray for me? And I say, yes.
But just before we pray, let me ask you a question.
Out of those 70 people at your church, how many are really murmuring, discontent, spiritually difficult people to deal with? How many?
Three. I say, okay, how many do you think are demon possessed?
Okay, okay. I say, two more.
I say, all right. The same percentage prevails, matter how big the church is.
So I said, that percentage of people, I'll pray for you to have a megachurch. But remember that number of complaining, whining, murmuring, difficult, demon possessed people is going to grow percentage wise with the megachurch. So kneel down. And he said, they all say, no, no, whatever God wills.
So the point I'm leading to in that is that this section of David's life, he must have said to himself, I'm aging.
I have finally unified the kingdom.
I've won two civil wars, I've won multiple foreign wars, I've lived over a scandal.
I've solidified my kingdom, and surely I've got peace on every hand. My enemies are defeated. Surely everything is going to be okay. And he wins the war with Absalom, and before he can get back to Jerusalem, the people from the north Israel and the people from his tribe Judah, are bickering like kids on a playground.
And David, I just need to tell you, David's life, right to his deathbed, is filled with conflict, controversy and difficulty.
David never really has what we would call peace and quiet in leadership.
I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to say people shouldn't accept positions of leadership.
I'm just saying David, if David himself were standing here, he would tell you, don't expect peace and quiet.
Just lead boldly, do what's right.
But remember, you're just going to have controversy and difficulty and bickering. It's going to happen because you're not leading sheep, you're leading people and people or who they are.
And I hope that doesn't sound, I know the young people here are saying, how did he become so bitter?
It's not that. It's, I'm giving. I'm talking about realism in life and leadership.
If you own a.
Forget about being the king of a country. If you owned a gas station with five employees, sooner or later there'd be a fist fight. And in the garage, it's. And. And I'm just saying it doesn't really change anything. It just is, you still have to run that gas station.
That didn't help you, but I feel lots better.
I just needed to get that off of my chest.
All right, so there is. You can see in the passage that we read, there is this simmering discontent between Israel, the ten northern tribes, and Judah.
It's still there. It was there before. It was there before Saul.
You can read it in the Book of Judges, you can read the discontent between these tribes. And finally, ultimately, after David, after Solomon, after their descendants, it erupts again into total and complete civil discord. And they break apart, and they break apart into two different kingdoms. But you can see it here.
So there arises out of Benjamin, the tribe of Benjamin. And you'll remember that's Saul's tribe.
And just to remind you, it is also Paul the Apostle, who is named Saul at birth, because he's named for the most famous person ever to come out of the tribe of Benjamin, King Saul. Saul, who becomes Paul the Apostle, all from the tribe of Benjamin.
And out of the tribe of Benjamin, there arises this man named Sheba. And Sheba is described in scripture as being a son of Belial.
So let me just talk about that phrase for a moment because it is used periodically throughout the Old Testament.
It's not precisely clear what it means, but it just. It just means a person of a. Of a twisted spirit, a bad person, somehow, maybe related even to Baalim, but it is definitely a statement of a. Of a twisted spirit. This guy's a son of Belial, a Benjamite. He leads a revolution.
He raises up an army of the northern kingdom of Israel and comes to fight David.
And so David sends three armies out against him.
Joab, we've talked about this so many times. I know the names get complex. But Joab, David's kinsman, who is David's top military person.
He is the generalissimo of the armies.
Joab leaves with David's personal army, Abishai, who is also a relative of David's. David leads the mercenaries, the Cherethites and the Pelethites. They go with him.
And then Joab sends word to Amasa down in Judah. He is a general down in Judah. And he says, meet me at this crossroads with the army from Judah in three days.
And they get there, and Amasa is not there.
And they wait. And they wait. Finally, Amasa shows up.
How many. How many of you have been here to at least most of these teachings on Dyvit? Will you raise your hand? Then you will remember I've told you Joab is one dangerous hombre.
Amasa says, hey, I'm here. And Joab says, well, yes, you are. Come here and let me give you a hug. And when he comes to him, he grabs him by the beard and. And stabs him under his fifth rib and opens him up, and so it says very graphically in the King James Bible, till his bowels gush out. Isn't that pretty? And he throws him in the street because he wants to make a statement.
So what is the statement?
Show up on time.
I think. I think that's the statement is don't be tardy to things. No, no, that's part of the statement. The statement is this.
Why was Amasa late?
That's what we. That's what we don't know.
Joab imposes meaning on Amasa being late. Maybe by being late, he intends for Joab and his army to. To be hurt. Maybe he's trying to show Joab as a failure. Maybe he's jealous. Maybe he's still loyal to the last revolution from Judah, which was Absalom.
Maybe Amasa is still loyal to Absalom. He doesn't know why, but Joab says, I put up with no nonsense. Three days means three days.
And then there is this scene.
The army going by, see him lying there in all this gore and is slowing the army down until somebody finally goes over and drags Amasa's corpse over into the ditch so that they can march on.
So the three armies come to a town called Beit Macha.
And it just means the house of Maacah. And Beit Machah, that's where Shiva now has hold up.
And so these three armies, the army that was Amasis, the army of Joab's and the army of Abishai, they surround Beit Maacah. And this woman, we don't know her name, this woman comes out and she says, look, we don't want to be killed. We don't want you to tear our walls down and everything like that.
Who you really want is Sheba, right?
And Joab says, yes, just send Sheba out.
And this woman says, he's coming right out.
And they throw his head over the wall.
And Joab says, okay, that really actually all we needed.
And they retreat. You have to remember when we talk about David, people.
People impose on David the Felt board characters of elementary school, Sunday school.
Little David, play on your harp.
He is a.
He is a military man, a man of a violent, difficult era, a time that is filled with war. And he himself is such a man of war that you remember that is the main reason he's not allowed to build the temple is because he and his extended armies have killed. Tens of thousands of people have been killed through David's leadership.
Now, why make a point of that? And it is this that I think we get wrong ideas about people in the Bible.
We think they're all little plaster, a pair of saints with painted on blue eyes.
David is an immensely complicated, complex and sometimes conflicted human being.
A violent man in a violent era.
And yet, having said that, a man who came to know and experience God in such a prophetic way, and we'll talk about that on the last Wednesday night in such a prophetic way that David is numbered among the prophets and wrote in the Psalms things that are absolutely transcendent in their power, that are incredible.
That there's that it's almost astonishing. So this man of violence in a violent time on the cusp between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, that's what this is.
So now David goes back to Jerusalem. He has a moment of peace.
I wonder if any of you remember. I don't flatter myself that anybody remembers anything I say from Wednesday to Wednesday. But do you remember I said that everybody thinks David's sin with Bathsheba was his worst sin?
And I told you I can't measure sin against sin, as in this is a worse sin than that one. What I can tell you, it was way not his most destructive sin.
His most destructive sin happens now David finally has more or less Masalmanos peace, victory.
And so David decides to do a census.
Now, it is not clear in Scripture that a census is forbidden, but if you heard Travis, Pastor Travis, sermon on Sunday, one of the big three that he dealt with that satanic punch was egotism.
And for the king of Israel, what God wanted was to spare the king.
The egotistical, egocentric perhaps is a better word, trip of knowing I'm king over all these people and king over all these people, all these people. And David suddenly out of nowhere says, I want to know exactly how, how many people I rule over.
Now, Joab, who is, I told you over and over again, a very, very scary guy, suddenly has a burst of moral wisdom.
And he says, you, Majesty, please don't do this.
May your tribe increase, may there be more. May the nation get bigger. May there be thousands, ten, tens of thousands, millions. But let's don't find out the exact number. Let's don't do that. There is this sense, then, that it is forbidden for the kings of Israel to do a census.
David says, no, no, I want to know. And they do the census.
When they come to him with the census, immediately, when they call the numbers out, David is overwhelmed with guilt.
Oh, no, he says, what have I done?
And now to David comes this prophetic word from Gad that God is going to punish in a horrible way.
God is going to give you three choices.
You can flee before your enemies. You'll be driven out of Jerusalem and flee into the wilderness like you did before Absalom for three months.
Or you can have a famine in the land for seven years.
Or you can have pestilence, a plague of some kind.
David's answer.
I've given you some of the rough part about David. This shows you David.
He says, as bad as I've been, as bad and destructive as this sin has been, I still trust God more than I do people.
Let me not fall into the hands of people.
Don't let my enemies come after me.
I surrender it to God. And God sends an angel of destruction.
And this angel is devastating.
It says, 70,000 men die.
Now, you have to remember in those days, a lot of times, no insult intended here, they didn't even count women and children.
For example, in the New Testament, the feeding of the 5000 probably wasn't 5000. It might have been 15 or 18,000 because it was 5000 men.
So 70,000 men die of this plague.
So when David sins with Bathsheba, one baby dies.
When David sins with the Census, at least 70,000. At least 70,000 people die.
It's horrified, horrifying.
And David goes to God and he says, okay, okay.
These people haven't done anything.
Kill me.
It's that complexity of David, that fundamental conviction of the goodness of God and his willingness to be sacrificial in leadership.
And God says, of course not. Now, there is a passage here that just needs to be dealt with. And it says God repents him of the evil that he has done. So there are two words there that we need to deal with. One is repent and one is evil. It doesn't mean that God has been doing sin.
It means that what happened to these people was an evil thing. Nobody wants plague.
Plague is evil. But it's not that God did a sin. The other thing is when it says God repented of the evil it doesn't mean that he is convicted of his sin and quits it. It means that he turns another. Repent simply means to turn a different way.
So he turns a different way and sends the prophet back to David.
And he says, all right, go to Oronah, or it is also pronounced Ornan.
Go to Ornan and by his threshing floor.
Now, don't think threshing floor like this platform.
Think a natural threshing floor, a huge outcropping. I've seen it. Travis has seen it. A huge outcropping like this, rough but relatively flat, and that he owns it and uses it to thresh out his wheat and barley and other things like that.
And so. So David goes to Ornan to buy this. And there is a humorous. To me, not everybody sees these things as humorous.
Ornan sees him come in and this destroying angel is standing behind David.
And David says, I'd like to buy your threshing floor. This guy said, no, no, it's free.
But it says he can see this angel, but he's behind David and David's not looking at him. So David says, no. And again, an insight into David. No, I don't want to make any sacrifice that doesn't cost me something.
Let me buy it.
Now, here's what's important.
That threshing floor, or nonstretion floor, becomes the center of Solomon's Temple.
It is the rock of altar of sacrifice.
So David sacrifices on that and the plague is lifted.
But God has been working this plan and working through both the righteousness and sin of people.
And that threshing floor of Ornan becomes the center of the next generations and years and years of sacrificial worship as the Jewish people understood it.
Now, there is another interesting thing that happens here.
And again, it's so the brutality of the world of the Old Testament is hard for us. And there are concepts there, like, for example, the evil. God repented himself of the evil. It doesn't mean he felt conviction over sin that he had committed. He changed his mind, changed his direction about what these people perceived as an evil thing happening to them. So here's another one.
There is a famine that hits the nation of Israel. It's terrible.
And so David goes to God and says, why are we having this famine? What have I done now?
And God says, this has nothing to do with you.
This is about what Saul did to the Gibeonites, to the people at Gibeon.
Now, we're going to have to have a backstory.
So go back through The Book of Judges through back to the book of Joshua.
When Joshua invaded the Holy Land and conquered AI and conquered Jericho and began to just. His army was unstoppable.
And God told him, wipe these people out. Get these evil people out of the land.
The town of Gibeon came to Joshua in disguise.
They dressed themselves up in tattered clothing and they sent skinny, emaciated people into clothing and they had moldy bread. The Bible is very specific about that. And they said, we've heard about. They came to Joshua and said, we've heard about how you're winning and God is with you. And God is with you. We're from far, far away. We're from far away. Joshua said, so you're not here in this land. No, no, no, we're from far away. Look at our clothes. Look how far we've come. Look at the bread we took from our house. Now it's moldy.
And he says, they say, make a promise with us, or as they call it, a covenant.
Now, can you remember back to my lecture about David and Jonathan marking covenant?
They say to Joshua, make a covenant with us, that you will never destroy our town.
And Joshua does.
And then he finds out are in the Holy Land.
But here's the remarkable thing about the Old Testament concept of covenant.
It doesn't matter that you tricked me.
I made the covenant and I can't break it.
I'm not sure the American jurisprudence system is going to get that.
He says, I know you cheated me, but I'm going to honor the covenant.
And so he does.
Now, what is not recorded, but it must have been so well known that it doesn't have to be recorded, was that King Saul attacked Gibeon against the covenant. So Saul broke the covenant of Joshua, attacked Gibeon and slaughtered them.
So now David. So now you've got the story of Joshua all the way back, this unwritten story of Saul, King Saul attacking Gibeon. And now there's this famine.
And God tells David, this is about what Saul did to the Gibeonites. He broke Joshua's covenant.
And so David goes to Gibeon and he says, I'm the king now, but I know Saul broke the covenant.
What can I do to heal the broken covenant?
And they said, we want seven descendants of Saul hung.
We want them killed.
So David takes five sons, and the Bible says, he does not give them Mephibosheth.
Remember Mephibosheth, Jonathan's crippled son. He doesn't give them Mephibosheth, he gives them five Adopted sons of Michael, who are therefore the adopted grandsons of Saul and two sons of Saul's concubine Rizpah, and hangs them for. And remember, in those days, they didn't hang them, take their bodies down and bury them. The bodies were hung there to decompose in the noose.
So they wanted everybody to see them.
And Rizpah, one of the most astonishing and heroic stories in the Bible, she goes out there and camps underneath those dead bodies of her sons. And all day and all night she drives away predatory animals, nocturnal animals and buzzards. She drives them away month after month after month.
Months, not days, not weeks, months.
She protects these dead bodies. It's a fantastic look at mothers caring for and praying for and driving away satanic attack on their boys when there's no hope for them and not giving up.
Somebody tells David about it. They say, you, Majesty, you know those boys you hung? That mother's been out there from the planting and now it's harvest months.
He says, well, what's she doing? She drives away the buzzards. She fights off the. She fights off the animals that want to eat those boys. Month after month she lives out there underneath those dead bodies.
And David is so moved that he gathers up all those bodies, all those bones and buries them. With Saul and Jonathan.
It is an insight into who David is.
Now then there is this battle.
And I just want to say this in passing quickly.
David is now getting to a place. Some years ago, I interviewed an air A retired, not a retired, but an Air Force colonel who was years. And he said, I don't care how good a pilot you are, there comes a day when you quit flying planes and start training pilots.
And that's what David finds out in this story. He's on the battlefield and a philistine giant is going to kill him. And one of David's kinsmen come and kills that giant.
There are three other giants mentioned, three of them by name, and one is not described, is not named, doesn't tell us his name. It just says he has six fingers on both hands and six toes on each feet. Nice.
And some of David's kinsmen and followers kill all them. David kills Goliath, they kill four.
Now this is a very important point in leadership. I was talking about some of the challenges and vicissitudes of leadership.
But here's the outcome of leadership.
It's one thing to be a giant killer, it's another thing to raise up giant killers.
And David quadruples his effectiveness on the battlefield. He killed one giant. His people killed four.
Now, I want to talk about sort of a tedious thing. It doesn't. It doesn't seem very exciting, but this is important.
Now, David is kind of.
He's kind of gets to a season where everything is kind of calm around him.
And you see this other side of David. Not just bold military leadership, but this careful, methodical administration.
It's a rare gift. It's a rare gift for the guy that can lead a tank battalion across the desert and defeat an enemy, that's one thing. Another guy that can run an army efficiently, that's a different thing. The guy that can do both, that's a rare commodity, and that's Dyvit.
David, now realizing he's coming toward the end of his life and administration, he restructures all of the duties of the priests and the Levites, the religious order of the day. This is how you do this. You do this. You report to him. You report to him.
Then he restructures all of the musicians. And in Israel, this is how the music works. This is how we do this. This is how we do that. And restructures all of the music.
Then all of the people that handle baggage, he says, all of the logistics. In other words, these are the people that load the trucks. These are the people that manage the trucks. These are the people that send the trucks to the various locations.
He restructures all of that.
Then he restructures all of the guards, all the people that do the guard duty, in other words, the secret Service, all the people that are around the palace.
Then he restructures all of the tribal chieftains. This is very important.
What has been the tension between the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin and the other tribes?
[00:34:44] Speaker A: So he.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: He removes and replaces all of the tribal chieftains and elders, and he restructures the way the tribes work so that they work together in a. In a unit, in a unified way for a unified nation.
Then he restructures the entire Treasury Department.
He says, now we. We have to know how we collect taxes, how do we. Where the money is, who's doing what. He restructures. So in other words, the religious, cultural, military, and administrative government of the entire nation is redone. In his last few years in office, it.
I just wonder how David felt about doing that.
I just don't believe that he said, oh, boy, today we're going to work on the Treasury Department.
This is a guy who was born for battle.
He has been an outlaw A mercenary, a warrior, a king, a chieftain. Now he's restructuring the cultural, religious and administrative responsibilities of the nation. It must have been tedious for him.
Why?
Because he can see he's at the end and somebody is going to have to take over for him.
Now he says this temple has got to get built.
We've got a palace, we've got the government, we've got the structure, we've got the order.
And my prophet told me I'm not allowed to build it. And he says, I understand it.
I got blood to my elbows. I'm not even arguing with God.
What I can do is absolutely everything except actually build it.
So David begins.
First he gets the plans for the temple. He works with the architects. Then he assembles all, all of the material.
Everything, everything that it will ever take. Solomon isn't going to have to find one piece of tile.
He warehouses all of the material for the. For the temple.
And then he says this is going to take a lot of money.
So he runs.
Absolute prototype of a classical capital campaign.
Perfect. I've led capital campaigns from Dan to Beersheba, and this is the way it works. You set up a pyramid. At the top you have your top 1, 2, 3 givers. People that can really make a hit on it. Then you have your leaders. Then you have your middle range, then you have the others. And it says that the leaders gave and then the captains gave. And then finally it says and the common people gave gladly because they know the leaders had given.
But do you know who was the number one contributor in the capital campaign?
David.
David not only raised the money, he gave the greatest gift.
So why am I going on about this?
Showing you that contrary to his natural gifting, this is a desert warrior.
This is not Eisenhower. This is Patton.
Eisenhower ran armies. He never went on a battlefield.
George, Patton led tanks in battle. Eisenhower never led one soldier in a battle in two different wars, never led a soldier in a battle. Patton outran the maps in Europe.
David has always been Patton.
Now he's getting old.
He knows he's going to have to turn the kingdom over to somebody. And he says, this is not going to be the funnest period of my life.
But I'm going to get this machine in order.
I'm going to turn this thing over to somebody. Fixed, paid for, financed, ready.
And David in it's a. An insight not only into his administrative ability, it is an insight into his sacrificial love.
This does not come naturally to David.
He wants to sing, not organize singers.
He wants to Write poetry, not organize poets.
He wants to worship, not organize the worship.
He wants to win battles, not organize the Treasury Department.
But he does it. And that is a tremendous insight into the character of David that this is. This is not the fun part.
So what do we say when you come back next week?
We're going to find an aging King David.
Not in numbers.
King David died eight years, nearly nine years younger than I am right now.
But he had a lot of rough miles on his odometer.
It was a really good truck that had been ridden hard.
He had just busted the wheels off of this truck. And by 70, David is an old, dying man sitting on the simmering powder keg of the kingdom that he's.
That he's built.
David has lived through two civil wars.
He has lived through being an outlaw, being rejected, being hated, being courted, being called back, being made king of one tribe, being made king of a nation, of building a nation, of conquering a kingdom.
He has lived through all of that.
And so he lies. Now, we'll see this next Wednesday night, an aging, decrepit old man who just wants to die in peace.
And it's not going to happen.
If you.
If you would like to, you can get these books. You don't need to hear this, but I need to say it. I do not take one penny from any book we've ever sold. There's no Smoke and Mirrors. Hundreds of thousands of copies of books we've sold in three languages all over the world. And it all goes to support the ministry of which Travis is now president, global servants, particularly the girls homes in Southeast Asia and West Africa, and the new ministry that Travis has started in Honduras.
So I hope that you will go out there to the book table and buy everything that Ronnie's got. And remember, you're not just buying books, you're buying shoes for little girls. Now, will you stand? Let's turn our eyes toward the screen.
And one more time, let's see the greatest poem that David ever wrote and read it together aloud.
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on x@dr. Mark Rutland, or visit his website, drmund markrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leaders Notebook.
