Back to matters of Absalom and David.
After the faux reconciliation that satisfied both father and son, Absalom gathers an entourage, a set of chariots and men to run before him. This is a man who has his own fan club and sends them forth among God's people to declare how cool and just he is, how kingly he is. He is, after all, son of the king. He is happy to have a retinue running ahead of him to announce his glory and weight. There is some solid textual evidence that Absalom, despite having David as a father, seems not to have had any serious consideration of following the Lord. He played the role well enough but he only played the role in the presence of his father. Once apart from his father's influence he revealed his character to be considerably less marked by a desire to know and seek God.
Absalom's entourage is built to impress. He presents himself as someone the people ought to look up to and admire. While Absalom himself was very likely a godless man we must consider that even Christians can, at heart, be Absalom's in relationship to spiritual leaders, presenting themselves as big guns whose advice should be heeded and whose presence should be honored. They like to be looked up to, fawned over, sought for counsel, considered wise judges of character and that means that when such a man or woman regards you that you have become special by receiving the attentions, as it were, of a prince of the faith.
Absalom was always around. He woke up early and went out to where the people were and mingled with them. In modern Christianese terms, Absalom was at every church service networking and working toward his pet projects and pet people. He was able to be a warm, winsome, thoughtful fellow. When people had problems and were going to the king's court, so to speak, he intervened and offered to help the matter himself, noting that the royal structure lacked the means to fairly administer justice. This might be, in a church setting, a warm, glad-handing fellow who urges you to consider him for advice and counsel because the pastors are great people and all but they don't understand justice or fairness quite as well as he does.
Absalom was able to identify hurt people coming to the king for a legal hearing because they had not obtained justice elsewhere in the land. He was able to prey upon the weakness of the weak to sell himself as an advocate for truth, justice, and the Israelite way.
What Absalom was careful to NOT do at this point was to ever speak against his father. He noted that there was no judge appointed or intermediary appointed to remedy conflicts, legal cases, and the like before the people. It might be like, say, the head pastors not having adequately provided counseling pastors to help rectify or ameliorate conflicts in a church, so Absalom, if we pretend for the moment he is in a church, presents himself as the one who can get the job done. He never complains about the church leaders directly because he is too clever for that. Rather he can present privately that he may disagree with any number of positions the leaders have but he is too respectful and considerate to openly disagree because they are, after all the leaders. By way of incidental contrast, Joab, a bastard if there ever was one, would say, "May the king live forever, but why does he request this thing?" The Absalom in a church is more genteel and smooth-tongued at first but more dangerous than a Joab who is quite frankly an asshole but often reveals a better concern for the house of David than the "son" of high standing.
Absalom parlays his prominence into a case for his being among the leaders. "Oh that I were appointed a judge in the land! Then I would ensure that justice is done." His sales pitch is startling direct, that the king has failed to appoint someone to enact justice. Earlier David is described as being a just king who sought the good of the people. After his failure to punish Amnon for the rape of Tamar the royal family is marred by David's failure and inconsistency in executing justice. The people may well have believed that David was not harsh enough in punishing Amnon and too harsh in his reaction to Absalom. Wasn't Absalom the one who did what the king SHOULD have done?
There is a strange and sad irony here in which David is, for a time, not unlike Saul. Saul was a king who was glad to have the authority of kingship but had not bothered to execute the Lord's will. The son, Jonathan, ended up contending with the enemies of Israel as Saul should have done. Now, in a strange parallel, David had failed to execute justice and act against a sin, and the son usurps the role. Jonathan was, arguably, a nobler and more God-fearing man than his father. Absalom, clearly, was not, yet there is the strange parallel of a son executing a task that was by the understanding of that time and place the duty of the father. Both the godliest and ungodliest of parents can find that they have failed to do what is appointed at hand and that the children take it upon themselves to accomplish for themselves or the people what they believe ought to have been done. In the former category we see that chaos is about to erupt and in the latter it can be toward the work the Lord had commanded the father to do.
Now Absalom also had another advantageous approach, he did not let anyone pay hommage to him as a member of the royal court or for what he was accomplishing among the people. He may well have heard the cases at hand fairly or, as some suggest, he simply took the side of the person who came to him first and said, "Your case is good and right." I think it would be tough to make an assumption either way and the import of the text is not how, precisely, Absalom adjudicated individual cases, but the goal toward which each individual case was adjudicated. The end result was to destroy the legitimacy of David's rule in the eyes of the people and for Absalom to IMPLICITLY present himself as an advocate of justice over against his aging and compromised father.
Absalom did not let people pay hommage to him but, as it were, paid hommage to THEM. He feigned the position of a lowly servant advocating for justice when his heart is set on self-regard, self-aggrandizement, the accumulation of power and influence and prominence for himself, and, finally work toward declaring himself king in Hebron and destroying his father. Despite his not letting people pay hommage to him this was not a sign of humility in Absalom at all. Not everyone who appears to be humble and deferential actually is. One's apparent humility can be a mask for a spectacular pride and avarice for power and influence and getting one's way. Absalom was handsome, smart, popular, and had three sons and a beautiful daughter and was considered the most beautiful man in the land. He became loved more than David for how he presented himself and we may as well surmise he believed his own hype. Insurgents generally have to, after all.
And what is strange to consider is that all of this fulfills Nathan's prophecy from the Lord.
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