26 Powerful Lessons from 2 Samuel 1: David’s Grief for the King Who Hunted Him, the Stranger Who Came for a Reward, and the Throne He Never Mentioned

There is a kind of answered prayer that arrives exactly as promised and leaves you with nothing to celebrate. David had been told he would be king. He had been hunted for years by the man already wearing the crown. Then the waiting ended, and the chapter that records it does not read like a victory.

The lessons from 2 Samuel 1 grow out of that distance between getting what you were promised and finding you have no appetite for it.

If you have ever watched someone who hurt you finally fall, and been startled by what rose in you, this chapter meets you close to where you are standing.

Brief Summary of 2 Samuel 1

Three days after David returns to Ziklag from fighting the Amalekites, a young man arrives from the battlefield with his clothes torn and dirt on his head. He reports that Israel has been routed and that Saul and Jonathan are dead. He then claims he finished Saul himself at Saul’s request, and produces the king’s crown and armlet.

David and his men tear their clothes, weep, and fast until evening. David then has the man executed for lifting his hand against the LORD’s anointed, and composes a lament for Saul and Jonathan that he orders taught throughout Judah.

Lesson 1: God Kept His Word While David Was Busy Somewhere Else (2 Samuel 1:1)

2 Samuel 1:1: “Now it came to pass after the death of Saul, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Amalekites, and David had abode two days in Ziklag;”

One sentence holds two facts that have nothing to do with each other. Saul died on a mountain in the north. David was eighty miles south, coming back from a raid and sitting in a town that had just been burned to the ground. He spent the day his whole future turned finishing somebody else’s war, in the wrong half of the country.

Samuel had anointed him years before, and in all that time David never once forced the promise forward. The kingdom changed hands while he was somewhere else entirely, doing the ordinary next thing in front of him. Peter puts the principle plainly: the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness (2 Peter 3:9).

God can open the door of your future while you are standing somewhere else. Much of what He has said He would do gets done on days you will not remember, in seasons that feel like nothing is moving. The ordinary work in front of you today is exactly where you are meant to be while God keeps His word to you.

Lesson 2: What You Ask First After Bad News Tells You What You Love (2 Samuel 1:3-4)

2 Samuel 1:4: “And David said unto him, How went the matter? I pray thee, tell me. And he answered, That the people are fled from the battle, and many of the people also are fallen and dead; and Saul and Jonathan his son are dead also.”

What would you have asked? A man with a rival on the throne, told that a battle has been fought, has one obvious question. David does not ask it. He asks how the fighting went, and the answer he receives leads with the army before it ever reaches Saul.

Read also: The Book of 1 Samuel Summary by Chapter

There is a reason the Bible keeps giving us David’s questions rather than David’s feelings. A question comes out before you have arranged it, and it points at whatever your heart reached for first. Jesus said as much: out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh (Matthew 12:34).

Where does your mind go in the first three seconds after news that changes something for you? Not where you would like it to go, but where it actually goes.

Lesson 3: Test the Report That Flatters You Before You Believe It (2 Samuel 1:5)

2 Samuel 1:5: “And David said unto the young man that told him, How knowest thou that Saul and Jonathan his son be dead?”

Good news about someone you have every reason to resent goes down easy, and that is what makes it dangerous. Nobody checks a story that confirms what they already wanted to think.

David checks. Before he grieves, before he acts, before he does anything at all with information that would end years of running, he asks where it came from. The man is a stranger. The claim is enormous. David wants the source.

The pattern holds far outside battlefields. A report about a person who wronged you, a piece of gossip about a church leader, a story forwarded to you that fits your worst opinion of someone: the more it flatters your existing judgment, the less your instinct will be to verify it. Proverbs 18:17 puts it exactly: he that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him.

Ask where it came from before you repeat it.

Lesson 4: Scripture Reports What People Said Without Agreeing With It (2 Samuel 1:6-10)

2 Samuel 1:10: “So I stood upon him, and slew him, because I was sure that he could not live after that he was fallen: and I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them hither unto my lord.”

The previous chapter tells it differently. In 1 Samuel 31:4 Saul takes his own sword and falls on it, and his armourbearer sees that he is dead. Both accounts cannot describe the same act.

The Bible is not confused here. 1 Samuel 31 gives the narrator’s account of what happened; 2 Samuel 1 gives this man’s speech, recorded accurately. Scripture does that often, from the serpent in Eden to the counsel of Job’s friends, and expects readers to notice.

Almost every careful reader concludes the young man was lying to claim a reward, and that reading fits the evidence well. Worth saying, though: the text itself never writes the sentence “he lied.” It gives two accounts and leaves the reader to weigh them.

Every word of Scripture is God-breathed, including its record of what liars said. So reading the Bible well means asking who is speaking before asking what is true, because the inspired record sometimes preserves a false sentence exactly as it was spoken.

Lesson 5: What You Refuse to Deal With Can Come Back Holding Your Crown (2 Samuel 1:8)

2 Samuel 1:8: “And he said unto me, Who art thou? And I answered him, I am an Amalekite.”

Saul had been given one plain instruction about Amalek and had kept back what he liked of it (1 Samuel 15:8-9). Years later the man standing over his body with his crown in hand introduces himself with that same name.

Read also: Lessons from the Life of King Saul in the Bible

This is Amalek’s particular story under a particular command, not a rule that every neglected sin returns wearing the same face. The shape of it still deserves a long look. Something you decided not to finish with God can still be waiting for you long after you assumed the matter closed, and it can arrive at the moment you are least able to handle it.

God’s patience with a disobedient man is real, and Saul had decades of it. Patience is a different thing from approval, and Scripture never promises it will run on forever.

Lesson 6: Some People Only Show Up After the Battle, to Take What Is Left (2 Samuel 1:10)

2 Samuel 1:10: “…and I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them hither unto my lord.”

You have probably met someone whose whole strategy is timing. They stay clear of the battle, walk the field afterwards, take what is loose, and carry it to whoever will pay.

Amalek stood under judgment for exactly this habit. Israel was told to remember how Amalek “smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deuteronomy 25:17-19). They chose the stragglers. Generations later, one of them chose a dead king.

The habit outlived them. A marriage falls apart and someone appears with sympathy and an agenda. A ministry collapses and someone builds a platform on the wreckage. A colleague is disgraced and someone moves into the space the same week.

Watch what you find yourself gathering when other people are on the ground.

Lesson 7: Do Not Let Anyone Assume You Are Glad Your Enemy Is Gone (2 Samuel 1:2, 10)

2 Samuel 1:2: “…a man came out of the camp from Saul with his clothes rent, and earth upon his head: and so it was, when he came to David, that he fell to the earth, and did obeisance.”

He arrived dressed for grief and bowed like a subject before a king nobody had crowned yet. Then he produced the crown and called David “my lord.” Every move was calculated for the reception he expected.

He was not guessing blindly, either. He had a theory about David, and he bet his life on it. David tells us later exactly what that theory was: the man came “thinking to have brought good tidings” and expected “that I would have given him a reward for his tidings” (2 Samuel 4:10).

He was wrong, and being wrong killed him. Stop on that for a moment: a total stranger had built a picture of David’s heart, and the picture was ugly. People form theories about what pleases you out of things you may not remember saying, and those theories are a rough report on what you have been broadcasting.

If someone brought you news today that a person who hurt you had been humiliated, what would they expect your face to do?

Lesson 8: Refuse the Right Thing When It Comes to You the Wrong Way (2 Samuel 1:10, 15)

2 Samuel 1:15: “And David called one of the young men, and said, Go near, and fall upon him. And he smote him that he died.”

You are allowed to want something and still refuse the version of it being handed to you.

Read also: What It Means to Wait on the Lord (and How to Actually Do It)

The crown of Israel finally reaches David in this chapter, carried by a man who expects to be paid for it. David answers the delivery with an execution, refusing to pretend the terms stop mattering once the outcome suits him.

The promise was God’s to give, and God had never said it would arrive through a bargain with a stranger. The psalm David’s own life illustrates says it plainly: rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him (Psalm 37:7).

You can want a good thing honestly and still be offered it in a form that costs more than the thing is worth: a job that needs a shaded truth, a reconciliation that needs a wrong called a misunderstanding, a door opened by a lie you did not tell but would have to live inside.

The right thing arriving through the wrong door is still the wrong door.

Lesson 9: You Can Be Hunted for Years and Still Refuse to Be Bitter (2 Samuel 1:11)

2 Samuel 1:11: “Then David took hold on his clothes, and rent them; and likewise all the men that were with him:”

The pursuit ended, and what the chapter records David doing is tearing his own clothes. No speech about justice. No settling of accounts. He grieves.

Bitterness feels like something that happens to a person, the residue of being wronged for long enough. David had the fullest possible case for it. Saul had taken his home, his position, his wife and years of his life. Whatever else was in David that day, the record of his behaviour is not the record of a bitter man.

None of this is a rebuke to a believer who is still hurting, and the Bible never treats a wound as a failure. It is an announcement that the door out is real, that Christ can carry a grievance you cannot put down, and that people have walked through that door carrying more than you are carrying.

Paul names the hinge of it: avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord (Romans 12:19).

What would it cost you to stop rehearsing your case?

Lesson 10: Your Grief Sets the Tone for Everyone Standing Near You (2 Samuel 1:11)

2 Samuel 1:11: “Then David took hold on his clothes, and rent them; and likewise all the men that were with him:”

Look at who else is tearing their clothes. These are the men from the cave at Adullam, every one that was in distress, in debt, or discontented, who had gathered themselves to David (1 Samuel 22:1-2). They had thrown in with a fugitive Saul was hunting, and they had lived rough for it. Nobody in that company owed Saul a tear.

They wept anyway, because David did. He gave them a way to respond and they took it, and a company of broken men mourned the king they had every reason to resent.

Whatever your place, someone is calibrating their reaction to yours. Children read a parent’s face before they know what happened. A congregation reads its pastor. A team reads whoever is steady. The permission you model is usually the permission people take.

Give the people near you something better than your grievance to copy.

Lesson 11: Weep for the One Who Hurt You Before You Weep for Yourself (2 Samuel 1:12)

2 Samuel 1:12: “And they mourned, and wept, and fasted until even, for Saul, and for Jonathan his son, and for the people of the LORD, and for the house of Israel; because they were fallen by the sword.”

Four names in one sentence, and the order is not accidental. Saul comes first. Jonathan, the closest friend David ever had, comes second. Then the people of the LORD, then the house of Israel.

Read also: Why Was King David So Special to God?

Grief has a way of shrinking to the size of our own loss, and weeping hardest for the person you personally miss is no sin. What David does here is refuse to let his own bereavement stand at the head of the queue, and he puts his persecutor there instead. Solomon states the command behind the instinct: rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth (Proverbs 24:17).

That order comes from somewhere deeper than effort. It grows where God has already dealt with the wound underneath, so the man who caused it can be mourned as a man rather than filed permanently as an enemy.

The order of your grief is a fair test of how much of it God has actually touched.

Lesson 12: Give Grief Its Day, Then Let the Day End (2 Samuel 1:12)

2 Samuel 1:12: “And they mourned, and wept, and fasted until even…”

You are allowed to weep hard and then eat supper. Both halves of that sit inside one verse. Three verbs carry the grief, and then a boundary closes it: the fast ran until evening, and evening came.

Scripture puts no shame on the hours and no shame on their ending. Sorrow is given its room here rather than managed, hurried, or spiritualised into something more comfortable, and it is also not made permanent. The God who formed us knows what a body can carry in a day, and Israel’s own practice gave mourning a set span rather than letting it run without any shape at all (Genesis 50:10 records seven days of it for Jacob).

It is easy to fail this in both directions, cutting the weeping short because it feels unspiritual, or moving into the sorrow and living there. David and his men did neither.

Lesson 13: Nearness to God’s People Is Not the Same as the Fear of God (2 Samuel 1:13)

2 Samuel 1:13: “And David said unto the young man that told him, Whence art thou? And he answered, I am the son of a stranger, an Amalekite.”

David asks a second time who he is, after the mourning, deliberately. The answer names a resident foreigner, someone whose family had settled among Israel rather than passing through. If that is the sense of the phrase, as it is usually taken, then this man had lived within reach of Israel’s worship, Israel’s law and Israel’s God.

Read also: Lessons from 1 Samuel 4

And he could still stand in front of Israel’s future king and describe killing the LORD’s anointed as a favour he had done. Proximity had taught him the vocabulary while leaving the fear of God entirely out of him.

People can grow up around Scripture, learn the songs, use the language easily, and carry none of the awe that makes the words mean anything. Isaiah put the same diagnosis on Israel itself: this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me (Isaiah 29:13).

Where has familiarity with the things of God worn away the fear of God in you?

Lesson 14: The Fear of God Stops a Hand That Nothing Else Would Stop (2 Samuel 1:14)

2 Samuel 1:14: “And David said unto him, How wast thou not afraid to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the LORD’S anointed?”

Of all the questions available, why that one? David does not ask whether the man knew the law, or whether anyone saw, or what he thought he would gain. He asks about fear, and he treats the missing fear as the whole explanation.

Read also: Lessons from 1 Samuel 16

Every other restraint has a workaround. Reputation fails in private, consequence fails when nobody is watching, and even conscience can be argued down over enough years. The fear of God holds because it does not depend on who is in the room, which is why Scripture places it at the front of everything else: the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10).

A man who is not afraid of God will eventually do whatever the moment makes possible.

Lesson 15: A Conviction You Only Keep When It Costs Nothing Is Not a Conviction (2 Samuel 1:14)

2 Samuel 1:14: “…How wast thou not afraid to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the LORD’S anointed?”

David had said this before. Twice he had Saul within reach and refused, and both times he used almost these words: “The LORD forbid that I should do this thing unto my master, the LORD’S anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6). Those refusals cost him a cave and more years of running.

Now the man is dead and holding the line costs David his gratitude to the messenger, his safety among the Philistines whose enemy has just been removed, and the tidy version of the story. He holds it anyway.

Convictions are cheap while they are theoretical. The day one of them stands between you and something you have wanted for years is the day you discover whether you had a conviction or a preference. Hold the line on the day it costs you.

Lesson 16: Your Own Mouth Can Be the Only Evidence Needed Against You (2 Samuel 1:16)

2 Samuel 1:16: “And David said unto him, Thy blood be upon thy head; for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the LORD’S anointed.”

How much evidence did David actually gather? None at all. He calls no witness, examines no wound, and sends nobody to the mountain to check. The man’s own account is the case against him, and David says so aloud before the sentence is carried out.

Whether the story was true or invented, he had claimed it, and the claim was enough. Scripture treats words as things that carry weight in themselves, which is why Jesus could say, by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned (Matthew 12:37). He means that what you say will stand as evidence when God assesses you.

There is a warning here for anyone who has ever taken credit for something ugly in order to look useful, connected, or necessary to the right person. You may be believed. Some things are safer never claimed.

Lesson 17: God Gives His People Words for Grief (2 Samuel 1:17)

2 Samuel 1:17: “And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his son:”

Some of what you carry has never been said out loud because you could not find the shape of it. Scripture does not leave that to you alone.

What follows this verse is a song of pure sorrow. No resolution is attached to it, no lesson is drawn at the end, no promise is quoted to tidy it up. God preserved it in His book exactly like that, alongside the psalms of complaint and the whole book of Lamentations, and He did not require it to arrive at a happy ending before it was worth keeping.

Grief that finds words carries just as much faith as grief that stays silent, and often more. The God who kept this song stays near while it is still being sung: the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart (Psalm 34:18). He is not waiting for you to be finished before He will listen.

Lesson 18: Train the Next Generation in the Thing That Beat You (2 Samuel 1:18)

2 Samuel 1:18: “(Also he bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.)”

Tucked into a parenthesis, in the same breath as the lament, David gives an order about archery lessons.

It is worth knowing what had happened on that mountain. Saul went down under arrows: “the archers hit him; and he was sore wounded of the archers” (1 Samuel 31:3). The text does not tell us David’s reason for the order, and we should not invent one. But the two facts sit close together in the record, and Judah is being trained in the weapon that had just cost Israel its king.

Something has beaten you. A pattern in your family, a weakness in your church, a failure in your own history. There is a version of your loss where the lesson dies with you, and a version where the people coming behind you are handed what you learned in it.

Teach somebody what the defeat taught you.

Lesson 19: Write Down What God Taught You in the Worst Week (2 Samuel 1:18)

2 Samuel 1:18: “…behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.”

Your hardest seasons are the ones you are least likely to record, and the ones most worth recording.

David did three things with this grief. He shaped it into a song, he had it taught to a nation, and it went into a book. The book of Jasher is long gone and nobody has read a copy for thousands of years. The song survived, because God saw to it that the words outlasted the volume they were written in. A psalm names that purpose directly: this shall be written for the generation to come (Psalm 102:18).

Read also: How Did King David Die?

Grief that is never put into words tends to be survived rather than understood, and what is never understood is difficult to hand to anyone else. A page in a notebook, a paragraph in a journal, a letter you may never send: something of what God is teaching you in this stretch is meant for someone who has not reached it yet.

Write it down before the details blur.

Lesson 20: Grief Circles Back to the Same Wound, and That Is Not Unbelief (2 Samuel 1:19, 25, 27)

2 Samuel 1:19, 27: “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!… How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!”

Real grief is not a line from sorrow to acceptance. It goes round.

David says the same six words three times. They open the song, they turn it in the middle, and they close it. He has not run out of vocabulary; the man who wrote so much of the Psalter could have varied the line easily. Grief returns to the wound because that is what grief does, and the Holy Spirit let the repetition stand in Scripture without correcting it.

Which means the anniversary that ambushes you, the song in a shop that empties you out, the sentence you have said to God forty times about the same loss, all belong to normal Christian grieving. The psalmist kept the same rhythm: my tears have been my meat day and night (Psalm 42:3), which is to say that weeping had taken the place of his food.

Stop treating the return of your sorrow as a verdict on your walk with God.

Lesson 21: Guard God’s Name Among People Who Would Enjoy the Story (2 Samuel 1:20)

2 Samuel 1:20: “Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.”

David’s first instinct in the song reaches past himself entirely. He wants Israel’s enemies kept from the pleasure of this.

Notice what he had to gain from the opposite. Philistine celebration would cost David nothing personally and might even help him; he had been living under Achish in Gath only weeks earlier (1 Samuel 27:2-6), and the news of Saul’s fall did him no harm there. He still wants it kept out of their streets.

As a plan it was already beyond saving. The Philistines had found the bodies and sent word through their own country (1 Samuel 31:8-9). The line is grief speaking rather than strategy, and God saw fit to keep it in His book exactly as David said it.

Where are you tempted to tell a story about God’s people to people who would enjoy it?

Lesson 22: A Real Anointing Did Not Stop Saul Ending Like a Man Who Never Had One (2 Samuel 1:21)

2 Samuel 1:21: “…for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil.”

This is the hardest line in the song, and David is the one who wrote it. Saul was genuinely anointed. Samuel poured real oil on his head, the Spirit of God came on him, and he prophesied among the prophets. And his shield lay abandoned on a hillside looking exactly like the shield of a man who had never been chosen for anything.

Saul’s anointing was to an office, and losing a kingdom is a different question from losing salvation. The warning inside the verse is still severe and it is meant to be felt. The narrator of Saul’s life records the outcome in one flat sentence: the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul (1 Samuel 16:14).

Gifting and obedience are two different things. A calling that is real can leave a man behind when he will not walk in it, and years of God’s patience are not the same as God’s approval.

The oil on your head will not do for you what daily obedience was supposed to do.

Lesson 23: Look for the True Good Thing and Say That (2 Samuel 1:22, 24)

2 Samuel 1:24: “Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel.”

You will not always be able to praise someone’s character. You can almost always find something true.

Read also: Lessons from the Story of David and Goliath

David names two things about Saul, and both were verifiable by anyone listening. Saul had fought and his sword “returned not empty” (v.22). Saul’s reign had brought scarlet and gold into ordinary Israelite households, real prosperity that real families had enjoyed. Neither claim required David to lie about the man who hunted him, and neither one is spiritual. He reached for what was actually there.

That is a discipline worth learning before you need it. At the funeral of a difficult person, in a reference for a colleague who let you down, in what you say about someone who failed people you love, flattery and silence are both easy and both leave something false behind. Paul trained believers to look for exactly this: whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest… think on these things (Philippians 4:8).

Say the smallest true good thing rather than nothing.

Lesson 24: You Can Leave Something Unsaid Without Telling a Lie (2 Samuel 1:23)

2 Samuel 1:23: “Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.”

How does a man write that about this particular household? Saul had thrown a spear at Jonathan and called him the son of the perverse rebellious woman (1 Samuel 20:30-33). David watched that family tear at itself for years and could have described it accurately in a sentence.

Instead he says what was also true. They fought together, they died on the same field, and they had been loved in Israel. The lament never states the verdict on Saul’s reign that David of all people had earned the right to state.

Leaving out is not the same as lying. There is a way of telling the truth that says everything you know because you can, and a way that says what is true and stops, and only one of those is love. Scripture never asks you to praise what is not there, and it never obliges you to publish everything you saw.

Lesson 25: Jonathan’s Love Cost Him a Throne (2 Samuel 1:26)

2 Samuel 1:26: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

Jonathan was the crown prince. Everything David received, Jonathan gave up, and he said so to David’s face in a wood while his own father was hunting him: “thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee” (1 Samuel 23:17).

That is the love David is measuring here. It was covenant love, sworn between them years earlier when Jonathan stripped off his own robe and sword and handed them over (1 Samuel 18:3-4), and it had a price attached that Jonathan paid in full without ever taking it back.

Most friendships are never tested this way. But there is a kind of loyalty that only shows up when your friend’s rise means your own diminishing, and it is rare enough that David spent his last and warmest words on it. Who has stepped back without a word so that you could go forward, and have you ever told them you noticed?

Lesson 26: You Can Get What You Waited For and Have Nothing to Celebrate (2 Samuel 1:27)

2 Samuel 1:27: “How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!”

The chapter ends on ruined weapons. There is no coronation scene, no word of thanks for a promise kept, no reference to the kingdom at all.

Read also: The Book of 2 Samuel Summary by Chapter

Look at what David actually talks about across these twenty-seven verses. Saul. Jonathan. The people of the LORD. The house of Israel. The Philistines and their streets.

The narrator withholds the title of king from him here as well. Whatever was happening inside him stays off the page, and Scripture leaves it there.

Vindication, when it comes, tends to differ sharply from the picture you built while you were waiting for it. The prayer gets answered and the answer arrives with a funeral attached. There is real kindness in that. God gives you what He promised while withholding the smaller satisfaction you had privately attached to it, and that smaller thing was never the good you were promised.

Frequently Asked Questions About 2 Samuel 1

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Conclusion: Lessons from 2 Samuel 1

The lessons from 2 Samuel 1 come from a day David had every reason to enjoy and spent in mourning instead. He asked about the army before he asked about the crown. He tested a story that suited him. He refused a kingdom handed over on the wrong terms, held a conviction on the one day it cost him something, and spent his best words on the man who had hunted him and the friend who had given up a throne for him. Then the chapter ended on ruined weapons rather than a coronation. Ask God for that kind of heart before the day comes when you need it, because a heart like that takes years to grow. It is what remains after a long refusal to take by force what God had promised to give.