Objection: David Didn’t Have His Youth Renewed – He Had to Have Abishag Keep Him Warm

David wrote that God renews your youth like the eagles’ (Psalm 103:5), yet when he was old, he had such difficulty staying warm that he had a woman constantly “minister to” him in his old age.  Does this mean that David did not believe his own writings and that you shouldn’t either?

David’s writing in Psalm 103:1-5 would have to be considered a doctrinal statement.  If not, how could you take ANY of his Psalms, including Psalm 23, seriously?  His experience may not have matched what he wrote, but no doctrine is presented by the fact that he had difficulties in his old age.  David did quite a few other things unworthy of emulation, too – adultery, a cover-up, murder, and an unauthorized census.  Does the fact that he was a flawed man (as all men are) mean that his writings have to be rejected as Scripture?  No, of course not.

Likewise, we need to consider Solomon’s writings in the Bible divinely inspired, yet this man who had more wisdom than any of his predecessors proceeded to do some of the stupidest things imaginable, led astray by his outlandish collection of wives, some of whom were idol worshippers.  Imagine – a man who wrote Scripture and had more wisdom than anyone before him started building idol temples just to please his ever-increasing roster of wives.  His experience does not negate his doctrinal writings in Scripture.  Neither does David’s experience.

The statement that God renews your youth like the eagles’ should provoke us to trust God to keep us fit even in old age (Psalm 92:13-14).  An eagle does a good job keeping its youth renewed.  After it is 5 years old, you can’t determine its age by looking at it, though it will often live to be 20 to 30!  If a 30-year-old eagle can look identical to a 5-year-old eagle, we should ramp up our expectations of how God can renew our youth.

Use doctrinal statements, not historical experience, to prove doctrine.  Otherwise, you can fall into the same trap by assuming that healing Trophimus wasn’t God’s will.  You can’t build doctrine with experience even it was the experience of someone in the Bible.  (Having said that, there are plenty of Bible experiences that confirm doctrine, such as people going out and doing the works of Jesus just as He said that they would do as a doctrinal statement.)