David

" And let each of these, after the manner of blessed David, sing with thanksgiving:

This Samuel also anointed David.

and both kings, David and Solomon, were prophets.

I mean that mercy which both granted to the people the son of Saul who was to die by a vow, and freed David, confessing his sins against the house of Uriah, by pardon, and so often restored Israel itself as often as it judged, so often washed it as often as it rebuked.

that He from the beginning held intercourse, He held converse with the patriarchs and prophets — the Son of the Creator, His Word, whom by putting Him forth from Himself He made His Son, and thenceforth set Him over His every disposition and will, diminishing Him a little beneath the angels, as it is written in David;

Come now, if you have read in David, "The Lord reigned from a tree," I wait to learn what you understand.

Again, one who considers how a man might at the same time be gentle and high-spirited—so as to use his anger against sin, and his gentleness toward men—will find David noble in deeds of war, yet gentle and unmoved in requiting his enemies.

Often, too, the prophet's manner of reproof is useful to us, who, when David had sinned, did not bring down the sentence of condemnation from himself, but, using the device of an assumed character, set the man himself as judge of his own sin, so that, having pronounced the verdict against himself, he could no longer blame the one who convicted him.

And what does David say?

" Besides these things David also, the king and prophet, cries out:

with my tears I will drench my couch.

only let its manner be worthy—let it spring from a disposition that abhors sin, hating and condemning it, and that makes use of tears, as the prophet David says:

and the war of David against the same people for having violated the rights of his Ambassadors.

To clear up this point, we may refer to the second Psalm, which although it applies literally to David, yet in its more full and perfect sense relates to Christ, which may be seen by consulting other parts of scripture.

Thus David gives thanks to God, for subduing the people under him.

whom all the nations have obeyed — that is, in whom all the nations have believed — whose preachers, the apostles, are shown in the psalms of David:

Bring to God, you families of the nations — beyond doubt because the preaching of the apostles was to go forth into all the earth — bring to God glory and honour, bring to God the sacrifices of his name:

ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession.

And indeed this pure song, the stay of all things and the harmony of all, stretched from the centre to the limits and from the extremes to the centre, has tuned this universe — not according to the Thracian music, like that of Jubal, but according to the ancestral will of God, which David emulated.

" Now then, understand, O men, according to that blessed psalmist David:

" Where likewise David condemns the makers too:

as David, when he had named "gods," where he says, "But the gods of the nations are demons.

But we must pursue the other kind, the better, the one that leads to the better—the very kind that David, the poet of the sacred songs, used, when, as they say, he restored the king from his madness.

David being informed that Mephibosheth had rebelled, gave all his possessions to Ziba who brought him the news:

In the more mature kingship which presently succeeded, the military functions of the King are most prominent in Saul and David, but the judicial authority again manifests itself in Solomon.

The works of your hands, the heavens, shall themselves perish.

For he did not at once fill the light with the splendour of the sun, nor at once temper the darkness with the solace of the moon, nor at once mark heaven with constellations and stars, nor at once frequent the seas with their monsters, nor at once endow the earth itself with its varied fecundity;

if David too says, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’ and Paul says that one believes with the heart unto righteousness, and John says that each one is reproved by his own heart;

This opinion may suit Ebion, who makes Jesus a mere man, and only of the seed of David — that is, not also the Son of God — though plainly more glorious than the prophets;

For us too the psalms shall be patrons to this effect — not, indeed, those of the apostate and heretic and Platonist Valentinus, but of the most holy and most received prophet David.

— since every degree of the race is reckoned from the last to the principal, so that now they may know that the flesh of Christ adheres not only to Mary, but also to David through Mary, and to Jesse through David.

and when He promises anything to the earth, I will understand that He promises to the flesh rather, as in David:

"The kings of the earth stood up" — Herod — "and the rulers were gathered together into one" — Annas and Caiaphas — "against the Lord and against His Christ.

Who has already subjected the enemies of Christ beneath His feet according to David — as if swifter than the Father — while still the whole assembly of the populace cries out, "The Christians to the lion"?

"The idols of the nations," says David, "are silver and gold.

But even if the same strung the strings into sound, I will not deny that this art too has been practised with the saints and has ministered to God—hearing David.

And if I look round upon their examples—of a certain David thrusting marriages upon himself even through blood, of a certain Solomon rich even in wives—being bidden to follow the better things, you have also Joseph wedded to one, and on this account I dare to call him better than his father;

David, a man good after the Lord's own heart, is afterwards guilty of murder and adultery.

Straightway, therefore, the apostles — whom this appellation interprets as "the sent" — having by lot taken a twelfth, Matthias, into the place of Judas, on the authority of the prophecy which is in the psalm of David, and having received the promised power of the Holy Spirit for miracles and for utterance, first throughout Judaea, having attested their faith in Jesus Christ and founded Churches, …

You will communicate also with the homicide, because Ahab too blotted out the blood of Naboth by entreaty, and David purged the slaughter of Uriah, together with the adultery that was its cause, by confession.

" But we do find that to this species also belongs that first utterance of David:

as through David:

Of whose felicity David says:

Since indeed honoured with him is the death of his own religious ones, as David sings — not, I think, this common death, the debt of all (for that is even ignominious, by the indictment of transgression and the desert of condemnation), but that which is approached in his own person, out of the testimony of religion and the battle of confession for righteousness and the sacred truth.

the high encomium given of David takes no notice of him officially as a King, but only as a Man after God's own heart.