When I was young in the faith I wanted a cause.
I don’t think that’s unusual. Most of what I watched and read was built on it. A man on a horse rides the length of the line, face painted, and says something that makes frightened men decide to stay. They follow him. Every battle film I have ever seen has that scene in it somewhere, and I understood why. You don’t risk your life for a strategy. You risk it for a cause.
So when I found David standing in a camp of soldiers who had run out of reasons, I heard him ask the question I was already asking.
Is there not a cause?
It went straight in. Here was the thing I was looking for, named. And when I found the same word in Psalm 45, in a verse about a King riding out in his majesty, I thought I had found where it led.
In your majesty ride out victoriously for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness; let your right hand teach you awesome deeds.
I read that as a messianic psalm and I still do. I saw Jesus riding out to win. And I thought: even he needed a cause to die for. That was the shape of it in my mind for a long time — the King with something worth dying for, and me wanting one too.
I was looking for a cause the way you look for a banner. Something to be about. Something on the other side of the field that you ride toward and take.
But the verse doesn’t say he rode toward truth and meekness and righteousness. It says he rode for them. On account of them. They are not the objective. They are what the ride is made of.
And one of them does not belong.
Truth and righteousness you would expect from a King going to war. They are what a good King fights for and they are what he establishes when he wins. But meekness sits in the middle of the line, between two words about power, and it does not fit. It is the same word used of Moses — the meekest man on the face of the earth — who stood in front of Pharaoh and did not flinch. It is not softness. It is power that refuses to grasp.
Put it in a war poem and everything changes. The King who rides is a King who will not seize. He wins, and the winning is not separable from how he wins. Truth, meekness, righteousness are not the reason for the battle. They are the marching orders. They are what he does every day between here and the victory.
I had wanted a cause to die for. What was on offer was harder — a way to live on the way to dying.
He began his ministry with two words. Follow me. He said them again near the end, on a beach, to a man who had failed badly and needed to hear them a second time. Follow me. Not fight for me. Not believe this about me. Follow — which means go where he goes, at his pace, in his manner.
The men followed the painted man on the horse because he gave them something worth dying for, and then they died. That is the best a cause can do.
This King rides for truth, meekness, and righteousness, and asks me to come along behind him. The victory is his and it is already won. What is left to me is the marching.
I got the word wrong. I have had it explained to me since, and the explanation is fair. But standing in front of that verse at twenty-something, wanting something to spend myself on, I saw a King riding out with the right things uppermost in his mind — and I do not think I saw wrongly.
He is still riding. The three words have not changed.