Loyalty that waits for convenient weakness to collapse

When the elders of Israel came to David at Hebron to submit themselves, they came with flowery reasons: 'Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh... the Lord said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel.' Yet Maclaren cuts through their rhetoric with surgical precision: 'it had taken the elders seven and a half years to feel the force of these reasons, and probably their perceptions would still have remained dull if Abner and Ishbosheth had lived.'…