God's Kindness to the Crippled
/“”NE of the most tender and attractive episodes in the career of David the King is found in the ninth chapter of the second historic book of Samuel. The incident is beautiful in itself and it illustrates several spiritual truths like a parable.
David is fairly established on the throne and under a warm sunshine of prosperity. The Ark has been brought home to the royal city. The ruddy shepherd-boy of Bethlehem has waxed strong. He is reigning over all Israel and executing justice among all his people. But one day, while thinking of his beloved comrade of former times, he inquires whether any of the house of Saul is yet living, for he wishes to show him kindness, for
Jonathan’s sake. Ishbosheth, the weak pretender to the throne, had been put out of the way, and it seems doubtful if a single survivor of the hateful dynasty of Saul yet remains. But an old family steward, named Ziba, when called into the royal presence, reports that there is a son of Jonathan yet living, who is “lame on his feet.” This is about the only fact known about the poor waif of dethroned royalty. He is a cripple. Ever since his nurse had fled from the house at the tidings of Jonathan’s bloody death, and had dropped the little five-year-old, in her panic, he had been incurably lame on both his feet. And so he had been sheltered as a sort of” Tiny Tim” in the house of one Machir, beyond the river Jordan. It was not far from the spot where the revolt of Ishbosheth had been ended by the assassin’s knife. The region had swarmed with sedition.
As soon as David learns that a child of his bosom friend is yet in the land of the living, he remembers that he had once made a covenant with Jonathan to “shew the kindness of the Lord” to his house forever. The only reparation he can make for his long forge tfulness is to send the royal chariot speedily to Lodebar, with orders to bring Mephibosheth up to court. As the poor, abashed cripple hobbles into the king’s presence-chamber he is perfectly overwhelmed. He falls on his face and exclaims: “What is thy servant, that thou shouldst look upon such a dead dog as I am?” Mephibosheth was probably a shy and gentle creature, like many others who suffer from bodily infirmity; but there is nothing which so soon lays one flat on the face as a volley of unexpected kindness. No artillery kills an enemy like love. If Mephibosheth had been taught to regard David as the destroyer of the dynasty of Saul, all his prejudice must have melted at once when the monarch receives him so graciously. Not only receives him, but adopts him, “for Jonathan’s sake,” into the royal household! He sits at the king’s board every day and “finds a royal table a good hiding-place for lame legs.” In that wild age of war and violence, when revenge was too often accounted a virtue, this little cabinet picture of the poor cripple seated at the imperial banquets has all the lineaments of the New Testament Gospel in it. In fact, as our readers have followed the story through, they must have recognized the most striking features of the divine mercy to crippled souls.
Every sinner lives in a rebellious region, further away from God than Lodebar was from Hebron. Every one of us was lamed by a fall, and impotent to restore ourselves. I was a moral Mephibosheth, and so is every one while under that “estate of sin and misery into which man fell.” Our whole nature corrupted by our forefather’s sin and the actual transgressions superadded by ourselves made us “lame of both feet.” It was a sorry picture of himself which Mephibosheth drew when he styled himself “a dead dog”; but many an awakened sinner has had the same estimate of his own unworthiness. Rutherford describes himself, in the same impassioned language, as having once been “a dead carcass, not able to step over a straw.” Bunyan used equally strong expressions of self-abhorrence; and those who have ever read Charles G. Finney’s “Autobiography” will mark how intensely he felt his guilt before God. I do not believe that any man can fully appreciate the mercy of God in Jesus Christ and the precious timeliness of atoning love to himself until he was thoroughly “broken down” in penitent self-abasement. The strongest men and women in God’s host have once been repentant cripples, confessing not the misfortune of an inherited weakness, but their own personal iniquity and shameful sins against a holy God.
There is a fine parallel between David’s embassy of kindness to bring up Mephibosheth to Hebron and the mission of Christ’s Gospel to crippled humanity in its exile. That royal chariot halting before the cripple’s door and ready to carry him up to the king is a capital figure of God’s mercy, that stops at the sinner’s doorway. Grace furnishes and mans the chariot. Grace sent gob’s kindness to the crippled. 291
“the only begotten Son into the world, that whosoever trusteth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” This home-bringing of the lame exile to the palace reminds one of that scene where the father welcomes home the wanderer from the far country, and kills the fatted calf for him, and clothes him in the best robe.
This reception of a repentant soul is all for Jesus’s sake; even as Mephibosheth was welcomed “for Jonathan’s sake.’7 Christ’s sufferings and intercessions are at the bottom of every sinner’s salvation. Paul leaves no doubt on this point when he says: “God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven you.” When we get admission to the marriage-supper in our Father’s house our song will be to the praise of Him who came to seek and to save the lost. What a family of restored cripples there will be at that supper of the King!
Our friend, Mr. Moody, in one of his racy paraphrases of this story of Mephibosheth, says: “Some people think that, like certain low-spirited Christians, Mephibosheth, after he went to live with David, must have been all the time worrying over his lame feet. I don’t think so. If David didn’t mind the lameness, it was all right. So I think that wThen he dined with the royal family, among all the great lords and ladies, he just stuck his club-feet under the table and looked the king right in the face.1’ This is a happy thought and happily put; but to me it is far happier still to know that when Divine Grace saved me it cured the wretched lameness and enabled me to “walk and to leap and to praise God.”