Horizontal reality is the life and times of people in relation to other people; vertical reality is the life and times of people in relation to God.

We expect those whom God called perfect to also be perfect before men, but it is never so.

When I was fourteen, youth group was one of the few places where a skinny, awkward, pimply teenager could be told he was destined for greatness.

Every week seemed to come with some variation of the same message.

God has a plan for your life.

God is looking for young people who will change the world.

God can use ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

To be fair, that’s pretty intoxicating stuff when you’re fourteen.

Most of us had no idea what we were doing with our lives. We were trying to survive high school, hoping someone attractive might eventually notice us, and attempting to look spiritual enough that our youth leaders wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Then one night, a preacher asked this question: “If you could be any person in the Bible besides Jesus, who would you be?”

Hands shot up immediately.

Moses was popular.

Daniel got a few mentions.

The girls picked Esther.

I seem to remember someone nominating Adam because he got to walk around naked all day, and everyone laughed.

Then someone yelled out the name that seemed to win the room.

The speaker smiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s my choice too.”

For the next forty minutes, he painted a picture of a life every young Christian guy in the room was supposed to aspire to. Courageous. Passionate. Adventurous. A warrior. A leader. Someone who wasn’t afraid to take risks for God.

By the end of that sermon, I remember sitting there thinking, “Yep. That’s who I want to be.”

What strikes me now is not that the preacher got everything wrong. Looking back, much of what he said was true. This person was courageous. He did take risks. He did trust God in situations where most people would have run the other way.

What strikes me is how selective our memories can be.

Somehow, over the years, I ended up carrying around a version of this man that was almost entirely made up of his greatest hits. I remembered the courage, the victories, the faith, and the worship songs. I remembered the stories that made him look larger than life.

What I didn’t remember nearly as clearly was the affair, the abuse of power, the arranged killing of an innocent man, or the fact that his family life was such a train wreck that it could have filled several seasons of reality television.

By now, some of you will have worked out that I’m talking about David.

He’s one of the most admired people in Scripture.

I’m just not convinced he deserves to be.

The Hero We Remember

If you’ve never read David’s story, it helps to understand why he became such a celebrated figure in the first place.

On paper, he has one of the greatest résumés in the entire Bible.

He begins life as the youngest son in an ordinary family. While his older brothers look like kings and warriors, David is left looking after sheep. Yet according to the story, God chooses him for greatness while everyone else overlooks him.

From there, things only get more impressive.

He becomes famous after defeating a giant warrior named Goliath with nothing more than a sling and a stone. He rises through the ranks of Israel’s army. He survives years of persecution from King Saul, who becomes increasingly paranoid and tries repeatedly to kill him. Along the way, David demonstrates courage, resilience, loyalty, military brilliance, and an ability to inspire people to follow him.

Eventually he becomes king.

Under David’s leadership, Israel expands its territory, defeats its enemies, and enters a period of stability and prosperity. He brings together a divided nation and establishes Jerusalem as its political and spiritual centre.

He is also remembered as a poet and musician. Many of the Psalms are attributed to him. Some of the most beautiful prayers and songs in Scripture bear his name. He expresses joy, grief, anger, fear, doubt, gratitude, and devotion with a level of honesty that still resonates thousands of years later.

To top it all off, the Bible describes him as “a man after God’s own heart”.

It’s not hard to see why generations of Christians have admired him.

If that’s all you know about David, he sounds like a remarkable leader and a remarkable human being.

The problem is that this is usually where the sermon ends.

We hear about the shepherd boy. We hear about the giant. We hear about the songs, the courage, the faith, and the rise to power.

What we hear much less often is what happens after David gets everything he ever wanted.

Once David becomes king, the story takes a darker turn.

The Other David

One of the things I appreciate about the Bible is that it rarely sanitises its heroes. Most ancient cultures told stories designed to make their kings look magnificent. Embarrassing details were conveniently forgotten. Failures were rewritten as victories. Flaws were airbrushed out of existence.

The Bible often does the opposite.

Just when David appears to have reached the peak of his success, the story begins exposing cracks that have been there all along.

The most famous example involves a woman named Bathsheba. One evening, David sees her, desires her, and summons her to the palace. The problem is that Bathsheba is married. Her husband, Uriah, is away fighting in David’s army.

Sure enough, Bathsheba becomes pregnant, and David panics.

What follows is one of the most bizarre cover-up attempts in the Bible. David calls Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, home from the war, clearly hoping he will spend the night with his wife and unknowingly provide David with an alibi.

The plan backfires.

Uriah turns out to have more integrity than the king. While his fellow soldiers are sleeping in tents and risking their lives, he refuses to go home and enjoy the comforts of family life.

At this point, David has a choice.

He can come clean.

Instead, he decides that Uriah has to go. David sends orders to place him where the fighting is fiercest and then pull the other soldiers back. It is a murder arranged from a safe distance, with a king using other people’s swords to solve his own problem.

Uriah is killed.

David marries Bathsheba.

And for perhaps the first time in his life, the giant killer becomes the giant.

The story grows darker from there.

David’s household becomes increasingly chaotic. One of his sons sexually assaults his half sister Tamar. David is outraged but seemingly does nothing. Tamar’s brother Absalom eventually murders the offender and later launches a rebellion against his own father, plunging the kingdom into civil war.

By the time the dust settles, David has lost multiple children, his family is shattered, and the kingdom he spent a lifetime building is deeply wounded.

What strikes me is not that David was flawed. Every human being is flawed.

What strikes me is the scale of the damage.

This is not a story about a man who occasionally loses his temper or makes poor decisions. This is a story about a leader whose choices repeatedly hurt the people around him. A husband is dead. A woman is exploited. A daughter is unprotected. Sons are estranged. Thousands are caught up in violence.

Yet somehow, when Christians talk about David, these details often become footnotes.

We remember the giant.

We remember the Psalms.

We remember that he was “a man after God’s own heart”.

The rest tends to fade into the background.

What This Says About Us

The more I think about David, the less I think this story is really about David.

I think it’s about us.

Late last year, a man named Ahmed Al Ahmed became an international sensation following the Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney.

The attack was one of the worst acts of terrorism in Australian history. Two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration attended by around a thousand people. Sixteen people were killed, dozens more were injured, and the attack dominated news coverage around the world.

In the middle of that chaos, Ahmed Al Ahmed did something remarkable.

While people were running for their lives, he reportedly crept up behind one of the gunmen and wrestled away his firearm. It was an act of extraordinary courage. He was seriously wounded in the process, but many people believe his actions helped save lives.

The story captured people’s imagination almost immediately.

News outlets celebrated him. Politicians praised him. Awards followed. Millions of dollars were raised to support his recovery. He received a standing ovation in front of 100,000 people at a major sporting event.

Ahmed Al Ahmed became a hero.

And rightly so.

Most of us have no idea how we would respond in a situation like that. We like to imagine we would be brave, but the truth is that courage of that magnitude is rare.

Then, months later, I read a very different headline.

The same man who had become famous for his courage was now facing assault charges relating to an alleged incident involving his elderly father.

What surprised me was my reaction.

I felt disappointed.

I felt disappointed because the story no longer made sense. The brave man who risked his life to save strangers was supposed to stay in the hero category. I wanted him to remain courageous, noble, and admirable.

What I didn’t want was complexity.

I think that is exactly what makes David such a challenging character as well. We want him to be the shepherd boy who defeats Goliath. We want him to be the poet who writes beautiful Psalms. We want him to be the man after God’s own heart.

The Bible refuses to leave him there.

Instead, it presents us with something far more realistic.

A human being.

The Contradiction We All Carry

As I reflected on David and Ahmed Al Ahmed, it occurred to me that perhaps the thing I found most unsettling was not their behaviour but my own expectations.

If I’m honest, fourteen year old Dan wasn’t analysing David’s character very carefully. I saw a giant slayer, a king, a warrior, a songwriter, and a man chosen by God, and I thought, “That looks like a pretty good deal.” I was far less interested in who David actually was than in what he represented. I suspect that is often why we admire people in the first place. We are drawn to qualities that we long to see in ourselves.

The difficulty comes when we discover that the people we admire are not actually the people we imagined them to be.

David was brave, but he was also capable of cowardice. He was faithful, but he was also capable of betrayal. He could write poetry about God one moment and make catastrophic decisions the next. The qualities that made him admirable existed alongside qualities that were deeply troubling.

The older I get, the less surprising that seems.

After all, isn’t that true of most of us?

I want to think of myself as a compassionate person, yet there have been times when I have been insensitive to the pain of others. I value honesty, yet there are moments when I have avoided difficult truths because they were inconvenient or uncomfortable. I like to imagine that I would act courageously when it mattered, yet I know there are conversations I have postponed, risks I have avoided, and fears I have allowed to shape my decisions.

The more I think about it, the less unusual David seems.

I know people who are brilliant at their jobs and hopeless in their relationships. I know people who would do anything for a stranger but struggle to be kind to the people they live with. I know people with tremendous strengths and equally obvious blind spots.

Come to think of it, I know at least one person like that every time I look in the mirror.

A Man After God’s Own Heart?

There is still one part of David’s story that I struggle to make sense of. Despite everything we have looked at, despite the affair, the abuse of power, the arranged death of Uriah, and the chaos that followed in his family, the Bible still describes David as “a man after God’s own heart”.

If I’m being honest, that phrase has become more confusing to me as I’ve gotten older, not less.

When I was fourteen, it seemed straightforward. I assumed it meant David was one of the good guys. One of God’s favourites. A spiritual giant whose life should be admired and imitated.

Now I’m not so sure.

After all, the Bible itself refuses to present David that way. It goes out of its way to show us his failures. It doesn’t hide them in footnotes or quietly gloss over them. It puts them front and centre. If the biblical writers wanted us to see David as a flawless hero, they did a remarkably poor job of it.

So perhaps the phrase means something else.

One thing that stands out when you read David’s story is how little pretending there is. David’s life is messy, often painfully so, but he rarely seems interested in maintaining a polished image. The Psalms attributed to him are full of doubt, grief, fear, anger, joy, confusion, gratitude, and regret. They read less like the writings of a religious hero and more like the journal entries of someone trying to make sense of his own soul.

None of this lets David off the hook. Reading the story as an adult, I find it impossible to gloss over what happened to Uriah, Bathsheba, and Tamar. The damage is real, and the biblical writers seem determined to make sure we see it. They could have told a much cleaner story about Israel’s greatest king. Instead, they left all the uncomfortable parts in.

Perhaps that is the part I find most interesting.

The Scriptures seem remarkably uninterested in giving us role models. Again and again, they hand us deeply flawed people. Abraham lies. Jacob deceives. Moses kills a man. Peter denies Jesus. Paul spends part of his life persecuting the very movement he later leads. David fits comfortably into that company.

Maybe the point was never that David was exceptionally good. Maybe the point is that God has always worked through people who are complicated, inconsistent, and unfinished.

I still wouldn’t choose David as my answer if a youth pastor asked me that question today.

What I appreciate now is not David’s greatness but the Bible’s honesty. It refuses to turn him into a hero, even though it would have been easy to do so. Instead, it gives us a portrait of a human being who is capable of both beauty and destruction, faith and failure, wisdom and foolishness.

Strangely enough, that version of David feels far more believable than the one I was introduced to when I was fourteen.