Bible Commentaries

BANISHED BUT NOT EXPELLED

‘For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth God respect any person: yet both He devise means that His banished be not expelled from him.’

2 Samuel 14:14

I. God’s heaviest punishment is separation from Himself.—There are degrees of separation—degrees in intensity and degrees in duration. There are two great divisions: the banished and the expelled. The banished wish to come back, the expelled do not; the banished have lost peace, the expelled have forfeited life.

II. Banishment is judicial, but it is not final.—It is bitter, but it is curative. It is severe, but it is love. The banished must beware lest they go off further and further to remoter lands, lengthening and deepening their own punishment, till they get out of reach, beyond sound of recall and the circle of attraction, and then their banishment may become punishment.

III. God is always devising how His banished may be restored.—His Son died that there might be a welcome to all the banished ones, and that expulsion might be a word unknown in heaven’s vocabulary.

—Rev. Jas. Vaughan.

Illustrations

(1) ‘The woman had got David in a trap, having induced him to waive justice and to absolve the guilty by an arbitrary act. Then she turns upon him with an application to his own case, and bids him free himself from the guilt of double measures and inconsistency by doing with his banished son the same thing—viz., abrogating law and bringing back the offender. In my text she urges still higher considerations—viz., these of God’s way of treating criminals against His law, of whom she says that He spares their lives, and devises means—or, as the words might perhaps be rendered, “plans plannings”—by which He may bring them back. She would imply that human power and sovereignty are then noblest and likest God’s when they remit penalties and restore wanderers.’

(2) ‘There may have been in the woman’s words, though that is very doubtful, a reference to the old story of Cain after the murder of his brother. For that narrative symbolises the consequences of all evil-doing and evil-loving, in that he was cast out from the presence of God and went away into a “land of wandering,” there to hide from the face of the Father. On the one hand it was banishment; on the other hand it was flight. And so had Absalom’s been, and so is ours. Strip away the metaphor and it just comes to this, you cannot be blessedly and peacefully near God unless you are far away from sin. If you take two polished plates of metal and lay them together, they will adhere. If you put half a dozen tiny grains of sand or dust between them, they will fall apart. And so our sins have separated between us and our God. They have not separated God from us, blessed be His name! for His love, and His care, and His desire to bless, His thought, and His knowledge, and His tenderness, all come to every soul of man.’

(3) ‘We are all exiles from God, unless we have been brought nigh by the blood of Christ. In Him, and in Him alone, can God restore His banished ones. In Him, and in Him alone, can we find a pardon which cleanses the heart and ensures the removal of the sin which it forgives. In Him, and in Him alone, can we find, not a peradventure, not a subjective certainty, but an external fact which proclaims that verily there is forgiveness for us all. Do not be content with that half truth, which is ever the most dangerous lie, of Divine pardon apart from Jesus Christ. Lay your sins upon His head, and your hand in the hand of the Elder Brother, Who has come to the far-off land to seek us, and He will lead you back to the Father’s house and the Father’s heart, and you will be “no more strangers and wanderers, but fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God.”’