The King's Holy Violence Text: 1 Chronicles 18:3-4
Introduction: Kingdom, Covenant, and Conquest
We live in a soft age, an effeminate age, that has forgotten what kingdoms are for. Our modern sensibilities are easily scandalized by the Old Testament, particularly by the violence. We read of battles, of smiting and subduing, and we want to avert our eyes, as though God were some embarrassing relative we have to apologize for at the dinner party of enlightened humanism. But the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New. He is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and He has not changed. He is a God who establishes His kingdom through conquest. He is a God who keeps His promises, and those promises often involve the casting down of His enemies.
In the chapters preceding this one, God has made a covenant with David. He has promised him a house, a kingdom, and a throne that will endure forever (1 Chronicles 17:11-14). This is the central promise that will find its ultimate fulfillment in the Son of David, Jesus Christ. But we must not spiritualize this promise into a bloodless abstraction. The establishment of David's throne was a bloody business. It required war. Why? Because the world is in rebellion against its rightful King, and pretenders to the throne do not simply abdicate when the true king arrives. They must be deposed.
What we are reading in 1 Chronicles 18 is not just a dry list of military victories. It is a covenantal history. It is the record of God fulfilling His word. It is the story of how the typical kingdom, the kingdom that served as a shadow of the one to come, was established in the world. David is not just a warlord carving out a petty empire for himself. He is the Lord's anointed, waging the Lord's battles, and securing the Lord's land for the Lord's people. Every battle is a theological statement. Every victory is a demonstration of Yahweh's sovereignty. And every action David takes, even the ones that seem harsh to us, must be understood in this light. He is building a house for God's name, and that requires clearing the ground of all opposition.
The Text
Then David struck Hadadezer king of Zobah as far as Hamath, as he went to set up his power at the Euphrates River.
And David captured from him 1,000 chariots and 7,000 horsemen and 20,000 foot soldiers, and David hamstrung all the chariot horses, but left enough of them for 100 chariots.
(1 Chronicles 18:3-4 LSB)
Covenant Boundaries (v. 3)
We begin with the first part of David's campaign to the north.
"Then David struck Hadadezer king of Zobah as far as Hamath, as he went to set up his power at the Euphrates River." (1 Chronicles 18:3)
The name Hadadezer means "Hadad is help." Hadad was a prominent Syrian storm god. So right away, we see that this is a clash of kingdoms, and therefore a clash of gods. This is not David versus Hadadezer; it is Yahweh versus Hadad. The question being settled on the battlefield is this: who is the true God? Who is the real help in trouble? Is it the pagan storm god, or is it the Lord of Hosts?
But the key to this verse is the geography. David is on his way "to set up his power at the Euphrates River." Why the Euphrates? Is this just arbitrary expansionism? Not at all. This is covenantal faithfulness. Hundreds of years before this, God had made a promise to Abraham, defining the boundaries of the land He was giving to his descendants. What were those boundaries? "To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates" (Genesis 15:18). David's military campaign is a direct, conscious fulfillment of this ancient promise. He is not grabbing land; he is claiming an inheritance. He is acting as the faithful covenant king, securing the borders that God Himself had drawn on the map.
This is a foundational principle for understanding God's work in the world. God makes promises, and then He raises up men to be the instruments of their fulfillment. David's victories were not his own; they were God's victories, vindicating God's word. This establishes the legitimacy of his kingship and the righteousness of his wars. He is not fighting for glory or for gold, but for God's covenant.
Disarming the Enemy (v. 4)
Verse 4 gives us the details of the victory and a very startling action that David takes.
"And David captured from him 1,000 chariots and 7,000 horsemen and 20,000 foot soldiers, and David hamstrung all the chariot horses, but left enough of them for 100 chariots." (1 Chronicles 18:4 LSB)
First, notice the scale of the victory. A thousand chariots was a formidable force. This was the ancient equivalent of a fleet of tanks. This was the cutting-edge military technology of the day, and David utterly crushed it. The numbers of horsemen and foot soldiers are also immense. The Chronicler is making it plain that this was a total, overwhelming victory, a rout orchestrated by God.
But then we come to the shocking part. What does David do with the primary instruments of this pagan military power? "David hamstrung all the chariot horses." To hamstring a horse is to cut the large tendon in its hind leg, rendering it permanently useless for battle. To our sentimental age, this sounds wantonly cruel. Why not just take the horses for his own army? Why destroy such valuable military assets?
The answer is profoundly theological. David is not being cruel; he is being obedient. He is making a statement of faith. Back in Deuteronomy, God had laid out the law for Israel's future king, and it contained this specific prohibition: "he shall not multiply horses for himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to acquire more horses, for the LORD has said, 'You shall never again return that way'" (Deuteronomy 17:16). Why this rule? Because horses and chariots represented military might, human strength, and reliance on the flesh. They were the preferred weapon of the pagan empires, particularly Egypt. For Israel's king to build up a massive chariot force would be to trust in the arm of flesh, to adopt the methods of the pagans, and to turn his heart away from Yahweh, the true warrior of Israel.
David understands this perfectly. By hamstringing the horses, he is symbolically and practically destroying the pagan confidence in military technology. He is refusing to trust in the very weapons he has just captured. He is saying, in effect, "We did not win this battle because of chariots, and we will not rely on chariots to win the next one. Our trust is in the Lord." It is an act of radical faith. He keeps a token force of one hundred, perhaps for patrols or ceremony, but he deliberately neutralizes the vast majority. He is consecrating his victory to God by refusing to appropriate the instruments of pagan pride.
The Gospel of the Hamstrung Horse
This history is not dead and gone. It throbs with gospel truth. David, the warrior-king, is a type of Christ, the greater David. And his actions here show us how the kingdom of God advances.
First, Christ the King is a conqueror. He came to establish His power, not just to the Euphrates, but "to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8). He came to crush the head of the serpent and to defeat the spiritual Hadadezers of this world: sin, death, and the devil. His victory was total and complete. On the cross, He "disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him" (Colossians 2:15).
But how did He do it? This is the crucial point. He did not do it by adopting the world's weapons. He did not multiply the "horses" of political power, worldly wealth, or coercive force. The kingdom of God does not advance by the sword, but by the Spirit. Christ conquered through weakness, through submission, through the foolishness of the cross. He won the ultimate victory by dying.
And this is the lesson for the Church. We are engaged in a spiritual war. We have enemies. And we are constantly tempted to fight this war with the world's weapons, to trust in worldly chariots. We are tempted to think that if we just had more political influence, more cultural cachet, more money, more sophisticated programs, then we could secure the victory. We are tempted to capture the enemy's horses and press them into our own service.
But David's example here is a sharp rebuke to all such thinking. We are called to hamstring the horses of worldly wisdom and power. We are called to trust not in the strength of our institutions or the cleverness of our strategies, but in the raw power of the gospel of a crucified and risen King. Our strength is in our weakness. Our wisdom is the foolishness of the cross. When we rely on the world's methods, we show that we have forgotten our God. When we, like David, refuse to put our trust in chariots and horses, and instead remember the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7), we are fighting like true sons of the King.
The greater David has already won the war. He has disarmed the enemy and secured the inheritance. Our task is to walk in that victory, not by trusting in the broken weapons of our defeated foe, but by trusting in the King who conquered by the cross.