What makes for a good apology? It’s probably easier to define what a bad apology looks like. Parents, how many times have you said something like this? “Sally, you tell your brother you’re sorry.” So Sally shuffles over to her brother and gives a half-hearted, “I’m sorry.” Or how about the husband who comes home late for the tenth night in a row and says, “Honey, I’m sorry I’m late. It won’t happen again.” Right.

What if someone who had hurt you pretty badly, approached you, and with a genuinely sorrowful attitude, said the following. “I have sinned against you and acted very foolishly. You have been so nice to me and I have treated you very poorly. You really are a much better person than I am. I promise to try harder from now on.” Now, what do you think of that apology? If it was truly heartfelt, would it seem like a good apology? This apology contains a confession of sin. It is fairly specific and appears to be rooted in humility. All in all, I think most of us would be satisfied with an apology like this, because usually the apologies that we give and the apologies that we receive fall way short of this example.

This is almost the exact wording of the apology that King Saul offered to David after David spared his life for the second time. This chapter is not as long as some, so I want to read the whole thing.

The Ziphites went to Saul at Gibeah and said, “Is not David hiding on the hill of Hakilah, which faces Jeshimon?”

^2 So Saul went down to the Desert of Ziph, with his three thousand chosen men of Israel, to search there for David. ^3 Saul made his camp beside the road on the hill of Hakilah facing Jeshimon, but David stayed in the desert. When he saw that Saul had followed him there, ^4 he sent out scouts and learned that Saul had definitely arrived.^a

^5 Then David set out and went to the place where Saul had camped. He saw where Saul and Abner son of Ner, the commander of the army, had lain down. Saul was lying inside the camp, with the army encamped around him.

^6 David then asked Ahimelech the Hittite and Abishai son of Zeruiah, Joab’s brother, “Who will go down into the camp with me to Saul?”

“I’ll go with you,” said Abishai.

^7 So David and Abishai went to the army by night, and there was Saul, lying asleep inside the camp with his spear stuck in the ground near his head. Abner and the soldiers were lying around him.

^8 Abishai said to David, “Today God has delivered your enemy into your hands. Now let me pin him to the ground with one thrust of my spear; I won’t strike him twice.”

^9 But David said to Abishai, “Don’t destroy him! Who can lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless? ^10 As surely as the Lord lives,” he said, “the Lord himself will strike him; either his time will come and he will die, or he will go into battle and perish. ^11 But the Lord forbid that I should lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed. Now get the spear and water jug that are near his head, and let’s go.”

^12 So David took the spear and water jug near Saul’s head, and they left. No one saw or knew about it, nor did anyone wake up. They were all sleeping, because the Lord had put them into a deep sleep.

^13 Then David crossed over to the other side and stood on top of the hill some distance away; there was a wide space between them. ^14 He called out to the army and to Abner son of Ner, “Aren’t you going to answer me, Abner?”

Abner replied, “Who are you who calls to the king?”

^15 David said, “You’re a man, aren’t you? And who is like you in Israel? Why didn’t you guard your lord the king? Someone came to destroy your lord the king. ^16 What you have done is not good. As surely as the Lord lives, you and your men deserve to die, because you did not guard your master, the Lord’s anointed. Look around you. Where are the king’s spear and water jug that were near his head?”

^17 Saul recognized David’s voice and said, “Is that your voice, David my son?”

David replied, “Yes it is, my lord the king.” ^18 And he added, “Why is my lord pursuing his servant? What have I done, and what wrong am I guilty of? ^19 Now let my lord the king listen to his servant’s words. If the Lord has incited you against me, then may he accept an offering. If, however, men have done it, may they be cursed before the Lord! They have now driven me from my share in the Lord’s inheritance and have said, ‘Go, serve other gods.’ ^20 Now do not let my blood fall to the ground far from the presence of the Lord. The king of Israel has come out to look for a flea—as one hunts a partridge in the mountains.”

^21 Then Saul said, “I have sinned. Come back, David my son. Because you considered my life precious today, I will not try to harm you again. Surely I have acted like a fool and have erred greatly.”

^22 “Here is the king’s spear,” David answered. “Let one of your young men come over and get it. ^23 The Lord rewards every man for his righteousness and faithfulness. The Lord delivered you into my hands today, but I would not lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed. ^24 As surely as I valued your life today, so may the Lord value my life and deliver me from all trouble.”

^25 Then Saul said to David, “May you be blessed, my son David; you will do great things and surely triumph.”

So David went on his way, and Saul returned home.

From what we can tell, Saul was genuinely sorrowful for his actions toward David. This was an authentic apology that also contained a strong dose of reality and a powerful word of blessing, but in the end in amounted to absolutely nothing. Saul’s apology is described in 2 Cor 7. “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.” Saul had a worldly sorrow. Saul was an insane dictator who had occasional bright moments of sanity and sorrow, but he never got beyond worldly sorrow. But rather than focus on Saul’s failed apologies, I would like to explore David’s amazing life of forgiveness. I say “life of forgiveness,” because that is how David lived. Forgiveness is not just an occasional feeling or a moment in time, rather forgiveness must be a part of your whole life. We must be able not only to forgive someone who has hurt us in the past, but be prepared in advance to forgive when new offenses come our way in the future. Like David, I have to forgive the person who just threw a spear at me and I have to be prepared to forgive the next person who will throw a spear at me.

Forgiveness is like every other Christian virtue—it is a lifestyle, not a random action. If I was thankful five or six times per year, would you consider me to be a thankful person? Hardly! Just as thankfulness is a lifestyle, so forgiveness must be a way of life. I think this is why we struggle so much to forgive others. We assume that forgiveness is something that we pull out of our toolbox when we need it. When we’ve finished the job of forgiveness—or more precisely, when we think we’ve finished the job—we carefully put forgiveness back into the box for the next time we need it. But that is not the way it works and is one of the reasons we fail so frequently. By studying the way David dealt with the murderous Saul, we can understand how to cultivate a life of forgiveness. David is such a good example to use, because it is not likely that any of us will ever face such an enemy like Saul. Rarely will you find a more innocent person being murderously and repeatedly attacked by a more guilty person. In other words, if David was able to cultivate a life of forgiveness, then there is no reason we will not be able to do the same.

I am going to jump outside of this passage and steal the first principle from Jesus. Jesus commanded us to love our enemies. This is helpful in two ways. First, to love an enemy assumes that we must first forgive them. Second, this command gives me hope, because Jesus would not command us to do something that was not in the realm of possibility. David was able to love his enemy and Jesus told us that love for our enemy is possible. Before I even start the process of forgiveness, this gives me hope.

The second principle is found in verse nineteen and is a little more difficult to see at first. David said, “They have now driven me away from my share in the Lord’s inheritance.” Similarly, in verse twenty he said, “Now do not let my blood fall to the ground far from the presence of the Lord.” David knew that Yahweh was the God of Israel and he had already been driven far from the tabernacle of the Lord. Now he was afraid of being killed outside the land of Israel in a foreign land. God revealed himself to a particular people, the Jews, in a particular land, the promised land of Israel, and in a particular way, through the tabernacle. The characters in the OT understood that God’s presence was most evident among the Jews in Israel at the tabernacle. To some extent, this precedes even the tabernacle. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all buried in the Promised Land. Before Joseph died he gave strict orders to have his bones carried back to the land of promise. This was such an important promise that we are told that Moses made certain that Joseph’s bones came with him during the exodus from Egypt. The bones of Joseph even get special mention in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. “By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions about his bones.” Under the new covenant, we understand more than David did, that God is ever present and is in no way limited to any one area. But this concern of David shows that his chief concern was the presence of the Lord. It was troubling that Saul wanted him dead, but I think he was even more troubled by the fact that Saul had chased him away from the Promised Land and the presence of the Lord. As David wrote in Psalm 16, “The Lord is my portion …and my inheritance.” To be away from God’s land was to be away from God’s presence.

Therefore, David was able to cultivate forgiveness in his life because he had learned to cultivate the presence of the Lord. In effect, David was asking himself, “What is of greater value—to do what I want or to do what the Lord wants?” I am sure there were times when David dreamed about putting an end to Saul. It would not have been that difficult to justify retaliation either. David did not take revenge upon Saul because he was the Lord’s anointed. But who was David? He was also the Lord’s anointed. None other than Samuel, at the Lord’s command, poured oil over his head. David was the Lord’s anointed, but he refused to become another Saul. He submitted himself to the Lord’s will and the Lord’s timing. He reasoned that it was so much better to submit to and obey the Lord than it was to go his own way.

This is too often a roadblock for us, because we are not convinced that it is better to do things God’s way instead of our way. I like the way Randy Alcorn says it. He writes, “Sin is not just wrong, it is stupid.” In so doing, we fail to realize that following God is ultimately better for us. As Christians, we set up this false dichotomy, like each decision stands before us like a fork in the road. We can look down the road that is the pathway to God, and it looks like a difficult road filled with suffering and misery. It doesn’t look like the road we want to take. The other fork in the road is our own path, and this one looks much safer, certain and filled with pleasure. On our bad days, we choose our own path, and on good day, we convince ourselves that to be a “good Christian,” we should take God’s road. We know we’re probably not going to like it, but we walk that path anyway. We grin and bear it.

We have trained ourselves to think this way, but this was not the way David saw his two choices.

In verse 23, David said, The Lord rewards every man for his righteousness and faithfulness. By forgiving Saul, David was seeking a reward. But this is not the usual way we think about forgiveness. We think that forgiveness is unfair because we have to do all the hard work of forgiveness and the person we forgive is free and clear. We fail to see that our act of forgiveness is good for us and is a means of receiving a reward. What is this reward? Before we get to that, I want to use some diagrams to illustrate this process.

When someone throws a proverbial spear at you, it is a real offense. This is always the first step in forgiveness, that we acknowledge the offense and not try to downplay it. (Figure 1) If someone truly hurts us and we say, “Oh, it was no big deal,” we are not working toward forgiveness but rather denial. Remember though, that not all of our perceived offenses are actual offenses. Maybe we have an extremely thin skin and offend very easily. For some people, perhaps up to half of their perceived offenses are not really offenses at all. Once you determine if it is a genuine offense, you need to acknowledge the hurt that was caused you. Obviously, David didn’t have any trouble with this step.

The second step is to see that all offenses against us, unless they are forgiven immediately after they happen, form a type of chain of bondage linking us to the offending person. (Figure 2) We are bound to this person by our lack of forgiveness. We become angry at them. We think about them all the time. A root of bitterness begins to grow inside us. When we see this person, our stomach becomes knotted up and we are likely to turn around and walk the other way .You are bound to this person by your chain of unforgiveness. If you have been hurt by multiple people, then you have that same number of chains binding you to each person. Understand that you can be chained in this way to someone who has died. The chains of bitterness are not stopped by the grave. This shows us that all of our bitterness and vengeance is wasted. After all, what good does it do to hate a dead person? It doesn’t right any wrongs. It doesn’t punish the other person in any way. Our bitterness is wasted on most everyone, because if someone truly meant to hurt you, they probably don’t care what you think, or that you are still carrying around this heavy burden. Still others may not even know that they offended you and therefore, cannot be aware of this chain of bitterness. Our bitterness is absolutely wasted and doesn’t harm anyone but ourselves.

Furthermore, the fact that you can forgive a dead person tells us that true forgiveness has absolutely nothing to do with the other person. David received two apologies from Saul, in this chapter and in chapter 24. However, David had already forgiven Saul before he apologized. If he had not done this, what do you think he would have done when he found Saul in the back of the cave in chapter 24? He would have done what his men urged him to do. He would have killed Saul on the spot. What if he had not forgiven Saul in this chapter? David and Abishai snuck into the camp and found Saul sleeping. What was near Saul’s head? That dreaded spear; the spear which Saul threw at David three times; the spear that was meant for David’s demise. Had he not already forgiven Saul, he would have taken that spear, with or without the encouragement from Abishai, and he would have pierced Saul through the heart with it.

Most of us will never have a greater reason to hate someone as David did, nor will we ever be given such a perfect opportunity for vengeance. Who would have blamed him for killing Saul? His men would have cheered. He may have been placed on the throne of Israel a few years sooner, but he would have been no better than Saul. The true temptation in this story came from Abishai. He tried to convince David that the Lord had presented this golden opportunity for vengeance. There is only one thing worse than justifying a sin, and that is justifying a sin by baptizing it religious language. Just because you can twist a few verses out of context and make it justify what you want it to say, does not make it right. Be on guard against so-called friends like Abishai who lead you to sin by claiming it is the Lord’s will, but be especially on guard against these tendencies in ourselves. No one is more blind to your own sin than you are. Thankfully, David had developed a lifestyle of forgiveness before this temptation for vengeance came his way.

David had already worked through the step represented by Figure 3. He knew that he was bound to Saul and he knew that he needed to release the chain around both of them. But again, this had nothing to do with Saul’s apology, because David forgave him before Saul apologized. This is a terrible misunderstanding we have about forgiveness. We falsely assume that in order to forgive someone, they must be first be sorrowful and repentant. Let me say it again. Forgiveness has nothing to do with anything the other person will ever say or do. Your forgiveness toward them is between you and the Lord alone. If this were not true, it would never be possible to forgive a dead person. You see, what we are confusing is forgiveness and reconciliation. We can forgive someone and still not be reconciled with them. Reconciliation requires forgiveness on your part and repentance on their part. But God calls us to forgive others whether or not we are ever reconciled with them.

But we must be careful to immediately get rid of the hurt and guilt after we release the other person. We cannot forgive someone unless we turn the pain over to God. Justice and judgment belong to God alone. In verse nine, we see that David was well aware of this fact. But David said to Abishai, “Don’t destroy him! Who can lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless? As surely as the Lord lives,” he said, “the Lord himself will strike him; either his time will come and he will die, or he will go into battle and perish. David was not able to predict how Saul would die, but he knew that God was in control of the situation. Whether he died of old age or died in battle, David knew that God’s perfect justice would be accomplished. Most importantly, David

Now we finally get back to verse 23 The Lord rewards every man for his righteousness and faithfulness. What if David had killed Saul—would he have ever been made king? David was rewarded for his humility and forgiveness later in life, but David also received an immediate reward—he was set free from the bondage of his own bitterness. We will never develop a lifestyle of forgiveness until we see that forgiveness benefits us as much as anyone else. The Lord truly does reward us for our obedience. Rewards are not an option for the Christian. Jesus commanded us to lay up rewards in heaven, but there are also rewards in this life. The reward we receive for offering forgiveness is freedom from bitterness. Your forgiveness may not help the other person. As we said before, the person may be dead, may not care or may not even know what is going on. Your forgiveness will probably have no effect on them, but it will have a great effect on you—you will be free, maybe for the first time in many, many years.

Finally, our choice to withhold forgiveness is an act of betrayal against God. As I mentioned in the message on mercy two weeks ago, if we withhold mercy and forgiveness, it is as if we are telling God that his mercy toward us is not enough. This is betrayal against God of the highest order. Who are we to tell God that the blood of his Son, Jesus Christ, is not sufficient? Or to tell him that we are glad that he saved us, but we will not share this mercy with another person? You will never be free of your pain and bondage until you understand and experience the matchless grace and mercy of God overflowing into your life and spilling out of your life to others. If you withhold that mercy, either you fail to understand it, or else you do not possess it. The hope of David’s life is that it is possible to forgive even our greatest enemy and that you can be free from your bondage of bitterness.

Rich Maurer

March 30, 2008