A fine and delicate sense of the becoming hindered David from building the Temple. A voice within him had whispered, "No: however right and praiseworthy the idea, you are hardly the man to carry it out. Your hands are too stained with blood." When the Divine word came, simply interdicting, it awoke in him at once a Divine perception of the reason and reasonableness of it; and the God-taught, God-chastened spirit within him made him see at once why the work of enshrining the ark, the ark of the holy and awful presence, must not be his.
I. Consider the remarkable self-restraint displayed by David. He who had lived much in camps and on the battlefield, whose will was law through the length and breadth of the land he could stay himself from prosecuting his darling scheme with the thought of incongruity.
II. (1) The self-restraint of David reveals the intense reality which God was to him, as well as the impression which he had of the character of God. How pure and lofty would be his conception of the almighty Ruler when it struck him as altogether inappropriate and inconsistent that a shrine should be built for Him by one who had been engaged, however patriotically and for the interests of his country, in shedding much human blood. (2) The picture indicates that, although a man of war from his youth, David had never been proud of fighting. He had had dreams perhaps in his father's fields of quite another sort of career for himself, and could see something far more attractive and desirable; it was not his ideal life; but it was what his lot had rendered inevitable for him and incumbent on him; it was what he had to do, and he did it. (3) Then, once more, observe revealed here the remarkable preservation of David's higher sensibilities. Neither the tumult and strife of years of warfare, nor the elation of successes gained by bow and spear, had prevailed to coarsen him, to render him gross and dull of soul. He emerges from it all, on the contrary, sensitive enough to answer readily to the whispered suggestions of seemliness, to be restrained and turned back upon the threshold of a coveted enterprise by a sense of the becoming. (4) Although precluded from doing what he had purposed and wished to do, he did not, as is the case with many, make that an excuse for doing nothing; did not, therefore, sulkily fold his hands, and decline to see what there was that he might do. (5) Then see how his true thought and noble aim survived him, and survived him to be ultimately realised. The Temple grew and rose at last in all its wonderful splendour, though he was not there to behold it.
S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken Words,p. 251.
References: 1 Chronicles 22:16. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xiii., p. 18. 1 Chronicles 22:19. Ibid.,vol. ix., p. 16. 1 Chronicles 26:27. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 131. 1 Chronicles 28:6. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. x., p. 333.