Category: Bible

2 SAMUEL #5. THE REAL HERO OF YOUR STORY

On By Pastor TomIn 2 Samuel, Bible, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

David understood that his life was part of God’s story, told for God’s purposes. He even understood that it was the Lord, not himself, who was the hero of his life-story. So, when everything that he worked so hard to gain seemed to fall apart, David continued to trust in God. Even in obvious-seeming situations, he did not assume he knew what God wanted. The Lord invites us into the same sort of relationship that David had. When we trust him, we find we can be at peace, even in difficult times.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download 2 Samuel Part 5

2 Samuel #5. 2 Samuel 5:12-25; 1 Chronicles 11:15-19; 1 Chronicles 14:1-17  

I want to revisit something we skipped over rather quickly last time. 2 Samuel 5:12 says this:

“Then David knew that the Lord had established him as king over Israel and had exalted his kingdom for the sake of His people Israel.” (italics added for emphasis)

I think this is a key to most of this chapter, and actually, to the entire life of David. David did not consider his monarchy to be his doing, or his kingdom. David did not consider his life to be about himself. The Lord was the main character in the story of David’s life. Even after he was anointed, for fifteen years David wasn’t king, because God didn’t want him to be king yet. When he finally became king, it was because God wanted him to be king. The Lord did it, for the Lord’s own glory and purposes. It wasn’t about David. It was about God.

The incidents that follow this verse confirm that David maintained this attitude, especially about his kingdom.

5:17-25 appears to describe the same event as 1 Chronicles 11:15-20, and also 1 Chronicles 14:1-17. What happened is this. When Saul was king of Israel, David was his enemy. For the Philistines, that meant that Israel was divided, and less of a threat. Plus they gained a great victory over Israel in the battle when Saul was killed. But seven years have passed. David alone was now king over a united Israel. The Philistines rightly perceived this as a threat to them, so they immediately went looking for David, to bring him to battle and kill him if possible.

The Philistines invaded by coming up a valley that led from their lands by the coast, up into the highlands that were controlled by the Israelis. They did this once before, early in the reign of Saul. The valley the Philistines used against David is called “Rephaim.” There is no place with that name anymore, but scholars feel pretty sure that the lower end of the valley comes out on the plains by modern-day Beit Shemesh – or, as it is called in Samuel, Beth Shemesh. There are two main branches in the higher part of this valley, one that begins to the north of Ancient Jerusalem, and one that starts at a point to the south of Jerusalem, just north of Bethlehem. My personal opinion from reading the text is that the Philistines were in between Jerusalem and Bethlehem (see picture below). In fact, 1 Chronicles 11 says that when they invaded up the valley of Rephaim, they took over Bethlehem and kept a garrison of soldiers there.

Some scholars feel that all this happened before David captured Jerusalem, but it isn’t clear. One reason to think it was before the capture of Jerusalem is that Jerusalem was such a fortress, David didn’t need to go to a different stronghold. However, David, being the great tactician he was, may have decided he didn’t want his troops trapped in the city where he could not effectively do battle, and so he took them down to the south of the Philistine advance. There is no way to know for sure, although the account of the battle in 1 Chronicles 14 puts it this way:

8 When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over all Israel, they mobilized all their forces to capture him. But David was told they were coming, so he marched out to meet them. (1 Chronicles 14:8, NLT)

So, whether it was before, or after Jerusalem was captured, it appears that David took his army back to one of his old haunts – the Cave of Adullam, where he had previously hidden from both Saul and the Philistines (1 Samuel 22). We don’t know exactly where the cave was (in fact it probably refers to a number of caves in the same area. But from what the Bible says, and from the existence of actual caves in the region, it was probably to the south and west of Bethlehem, and to the south of the Philistine forces in the valley.

15 Once three of the thirty leading men went down to David’s rock at the cave of Adullam when the army of the Philistines was camping in the valley of Rephaim. 16 While David was in the fortified camp, Philistine troops were in Bethlehem. (1 Chronicles 11:15-16, GW)

It seems that David went to the cave of Adullam before the Philistines got to Bethlehem. So, when David attacked, it was from an unexpected direction. Instead of meeting them head on, he attacked on their right flank.

Let’s pause here and consider a few things.

After probably fifteen years of running, hiding, eking out existence and barely surviving, David became king of Judah. After seven years as king of only one tribe, his own tribe of Judah, he finally received the fulfillment of the Lord’s call on his life. Finally, he became king of all Israel.

The confetti had hardly settled to the ground before he was invaded. In short order indeed, David was right back to hiding in caves. Maybe an economic analogy would help us understand how this could have affected David. Think of a person who spent half her life in poverty, working steadily at a plan to build wealth, but seeing few results. None of the breaks ever seemed to come her way. After years, she finally reached the upper middle class. At last, seven years after that, she made her first million. Three weeks later she was flat broke again.

It had to be an awful feeling for David to find himself back in the caves where he hid from his enemies fifteen years or more before. If he was like me, he would have spent a lot of time whining to God about how he had done everything that was asked from him, and why couldn’t he ever catch a break? If he were like me, he would explained to the Lord that he had already been here and already learned this lesson, and what was the freaking point of this kind of hardship anyway? But David was not like me. He was like I want to become. He was like the person the Holy Spirit was showing the world through him – the true Messiah.

So when David went to the cave, he continued to trust the Lord. He asked God a simple question: What do you want to do here? What are you after in this situation? Shall I go and fight these guys or not?

Before we continue the main narrative, there’s a cool story about something that happened while David was in the cave during the invasion. There is no doubt that he did experience distress – he was a human being, after all. The enemy were camped in his own home-town (Bethlehem, in case you have forgotten). It was a hot and dry day, and David said (this was as close as he got to complaining) “I wish I could get a drink from the well at Bethlehem.” I think he was expressing that he was hot and thirsty. I think he was also upset that Bethlehem – his own town – was an enemy camp. He’s basically saying: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, right now, if we could just walk up to that beautiful cold well in Bethlehem and have a drink? Wouldn’t it be great if there were no invasion at all?”

David was a fearsome warrior, and he led a bunch of other very powerful warriors. Three of the mightiest took David at his word, and broke through the Philistine lines and brought David a drink from the well at Bethlehem. David’s response is interesting:

They brought it back to David, but he refused to drink it. Instead, he poured it out to the LORD. 19 David said, “I would never do such a thing in the presence of God! How can I drink the blood of these men who risked their lives? ” For they brought it at the risk of their lives. So he would not drink it. Such were the exploits of the three warriors. (1 Chronicles 11:18-19)

When I first read this, I thought, “I’d be angry if I were one of those three warriors.” But actually, I think what David was saying was this: “I am not worthy of such a costly drink. I can’t claim it. Only the Lord is worthy of that kind of effort and self-sacrifice.” He was actually honoring the men more by pouring it out than by drinking it. He “poured it out to the Lord.” He was saying that the lives of these men were precious to the Lord. There was a actually a type of offering called a drink offering, where a drink (usually wine) was poured into the ground. The idea was to say, “this is God’s, not mine, and I pour it out to show that everything I drink ultimately comes from God.” So David did not consider himself worthy of that kind of sacrifice from his men, and he directed their attention to the Lord. Life wasn’t about him, it was about God. God was the one who gave them the strength and flat-out guts to do this amazing deed. He was the one who was to be honored, not David.

The hero of this entire story is the Lord. David consciously realized this, and made statements to draw attention to the Lord, rather than himself. We think of God as loving and gracious and giving and kind – like the best possible parent. And yet, he is also the best, the only true Greatest Of All Time. No NBA superstar has more game than the Holy Spirit. No downhill skier can take a mogul like God. No warrior can be more ferocious and cunning than Jesus. No writer can craft a better story, no historian can plumb more significance from events than the Father. No musician can play a concerto or improvise a lick better than the Lord. Our Triune God is not just the writer and director of the play – he himself is the star performer, and he is brilliant at all he does.

I don’t know about you, but at my age, I don’t go in for hero-worship. Actually, I never did. Human heroes always suffer from significant flaws, and we get disappointed when we really give them our admiration. But there is one Person who is worthy of our hero-worship. David understood that, and he also understood that it wasn’t him. The amazing feats we see in other people – or the amazing things we can do ourselves – are just tiny reflections of the overwhelming awesomeness of God.

So David heard that God wanted to drive the Philistines out of Israel, and David obediently attacked. The Philistines were defeated, and David named the spot, “The Lord Breaks Out” (that’s what “Baal-perazim” means). Not “I have gotten victory.” Not even, “God helped me get a victory,” or even yet, “God got victory – for me.” No – it was God’s victory for God’s purposes and God’s glory. David and his men got to be the fierce warriors that they were created to be – but it was all about the Lord and for the Lord.

The Philistines made a second try. I love the fact that David did not assume that he should do the same thing again, just because it was the same situation. Instead, once more, he asked God what he wanted to do. The Lord did want him to fight again, but he gave David a different specific battle plan, along with the promise that God would be marching out in front of him, doing the real work of winning the battle.

So what do we take away from all this? The first thing I need to get straight is this business that my life is here for God’s plan, God’s purposes and his glory. None of what I am supposed to do is about me. God is amazing and gracious, and so even while he makes use of our lives for his own purposes, he blesses us in the midst of that. David got to be the king and lead like he was made to lead; he got to fight like the warrior he was created to be.

I get to study the bible and think and use my brain and then share it with people who are willing to listen to me. I get to sit here and tap on my keyboard and express the thoughts that the Lord gives me to express. I love it – I really do. It isn’t my message, and it isn’t about me, but I get blessed when I let God do his thing with my life. You will get blessed when you let him do his thing with your life – which is almost certainly going to look different from everybody else, because God has a unique purpose for each one of us. When I say “blessed,” I don’t necessarily mean financially or physically blessed – we Americans, especially, think that’s the main kind of blessing (it’s not). But you will experience the grace and favor of God if you let him be the hero of your life’s story. You’ll appreciate the story he writes through you.

Second, I need to remember that one kind of hero-worship IS acceptable. I need to pay more attention to how skilled, talented, smart, funny, tender, fierce and truly excellent God is. He deserves my worship and admiration. He is the best – at everything.

Third, when life takes a turn for the worse – as it did for David, many times in his life – I need to remember that this is all in God’s hands. If he wanted to hide this great leader of men, this fearsome warrior, in a cave, that was his business – David was his man whether on the throne, or in a cave. If God wants to allow hardship in my life, I will certainly pray for it to be cut short, and I will certainly believe that he will bring better times too. But I will also trust in the meantime that he knows what he is doing and I am ALWAYS in his hands.

I also want to take this away from the text: God is the one who fights the battles I have to be involved in. Most people are probably not called to physical warfare, like David was (although some people certainly are). But sometimes we are called to make a stand for something that is important to God. At other times the Lord calls us to engage in some project, or to work at a certain place, or be involved with certain people, and so on. We can consider all these things “battles” for the purposes of applying this text.

There are some battles we don’t have to fight. Sometimes we go to war without asking God, and so we end up fighting for ourselves. But David went to war only when God directed him. And when he did that, it was God who fought his battles for him. So if you are in a battle that you have to be in, one that you are supposed to fight, remember, it is God who really achieves the victory. All we need to do is show up and let him use us. I take great comfort in that.

The flipside is important, too. We don’t need to fight any battles except the ones the Lord has for us. It’s a good lesson to learn from David that we should ask the Lord before just launching into some kind of endeavor. Even though it may have seemed obvious, David kept asking the Lord before engaging in battle. We might find that we have fewer battles to fight if we only engage when the Lord is telling us to.

When we realize that God is the main character in our story, the one true hero, it takes a lot of pressure off us. Our part is to respond to God, to let him work in and through our lives. But he’s the one telling the story of our lives, and he’s the one who is responsible for how it turns out. I don’t mean that there are no consequences to our actions. But I do mean that if we do our best to be faithful to him, we can be at rest about how things turn out. We can be at rest even when we fail at times to be faithful, because God’s nature does not change:

11 The saying is trustworthy, for:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
12 if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he also will deny us;
13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
for he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:11-13, ESV)

What is the Lord saying to you today?

2 SAMUEL #4: THE CONQUERING KING

On By Pastor TomIn 2 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment
Photo by Bharath Kumar Venkatesh on Pexels.com

David was the rightful king of the Israelites. He was God’s choice for them. He had already fought for them, and he was their own flesh and blood. In the same way, Jesus is our rightful king. He is God’s choice for us. He has already conquered the devil on our behalf. For our sakes, he became human—he is our own flesh and blood. Give him permission to be king over every area of your life. If you can’t quite give him permission to take a particular area of your life, give him just a crack, and see what happens.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download 2 Samuel Part 4

2 SAMUEL #4. 2 SAMUEL 5:1-12

After Saul’s war-leader, Abner, died, his coalition fell apart. Saul’s last surviving son Ish-Bosheth was murdered, and then finally the leaders of the other 11 tribes of Israel came to David to ask him to become their king.

The material for the book of Samuel was recorded more or less as it happened by Samuel, Gad, and Nathan. It was put into order and made into this book during the time of David’s grandchildren. We don’t know who put it all together, but we do know that they were willing to show David’s faults and failings. There is another book in the Bible that describes some of the same events that are found in 2 Samuel. That book is 1 Chronicles. Whoever wrote 1 Chronicles did so more than 400 years after David’s time. The author of 1 Chronicles clearly used some of the book of Samuel, but he was interested in different things, and he had a different purpose in writing, and so sometimes we get more detail, sometimes less. From here on out in this sermon series, we will occasionally refer to chapters in 1 Chronicles to fill in details.

1 Chronicles 12:23-40 describes more about the names and tribes of other Israelites involved in making David King over the whole nation. In Chronicles, specific leaders and groups of leaders are named, showing that a large number of influential people from all twelve tribes came to make David king. Chronicles records that they feasted and celebrated joyfully.

Back to the text in 2 Samuel. These leaders gave three reasons why they wanted to finally receive David as their king. First, they said, “you are our flesh and blood.” They were saying, “you aren’t a foreigner, that we should fight you – we are all Israelites after all. Judah is part of Israel.” They were recognizing that Saul’s attitude was wrong.

Second, the leaders said to David, “you were the one who used to lead us out to battle, and bring us back safely.” They are remembering his faithful service to Saul, which perhaps David thought had gone forgotten and unrewarded. David had already been their leader in the past, though that service was not officially acknowledged up until now. As a leader, he had accomplished great victories, and brought the troops back more safely than he would have in defeat.

Finally, they were acknowledging that God himself had chosen David to be their king. They were at last submitting to God’s plan for his people. They said: The LORD also said to you, ‘You will shepherd My people Israel and be ruler over Israel.’ ” They are acknowledging at last that God had a call on David’s life, and it was God’s will for him to be their king.

Verses 6-12 of 2 Samuel 5 tells us about Jerusalem. Up until that time, Jerusalem was controlled by a pagan tribe of people known as the Jebusites. They were a sub-tribe of Amorites – one of the non-Israelite tribes that the Israelites were supposed to conquer and drive out. However, there were steep ravines to the south, west and east of Jerusalem, and at the top of the slope, the walls began.

 It was a formidable fortress. The Israelites had defeated several kings of Jerusalem and had burned the city itself once (perhaps before it had walls), but they had never managed to capture it and hold it. Now, with walls, the Jebusites are confident that no one could take it. We should understand that it was much smaller in those days. The Jebusite City of Jerusalem covered only about 12 acres on the very top of the end of the ridge. This area is now known as Mount Zion. In the following years, the city spread out greatly, and in modern times, Mt Zion is just one hill in the very large metropolis that is Jerusalem.

In spite of its reputation and history of being impossible to conquer, one of David’s first acts as king of all Israel was to attempt it. David shows here that he is smart and cunning, as well as courageous and strong. Water for the city was collected from the spring of Gihon, which was near the bottom of the Kidron valley, on the east side of the city. The fortifications around those springs (shown in the picture above) were built by David, after he conquered the city. The Jebusites did not bother to guard the spring.

There was a shaft, or tunnel, that went through the hill down to the spring, so that the Jebusites could get water without going outside the city walls. David learned of this. It is quite possible that he observed Jebusites drawing water there, back when he was worshipping God at the tabernacle, when it was kept across the Kidron valley, at Nob (now known as the Mount of Olives). In any case, he determined that the way to take the city was to infiltrate men up the water tunnel. It was a very narrow space, and the men would certainly have had to go one by one, gathering at the top before the assault. That is what David did, with his nephew Joab leading the way and killing the first enemy. By doing that, Joab cemented his position as commander of David’s armies. The city fell without any destruction to the walls, and David made it the new capital of Israel.

These are the actions of a brilliant leader. First, it was terrific military strategy to make use of the water shaft, and attack the Jebusites from within the city. Second, Jerusalem was still an impregnable fortress, an excellent choice for the seat of government in troubled times. Afterward, David built towers covering the entrance to the water shaft, so no one would take the city the same way he had.

Third, it was an extraordinary diplomatic move. David was from the tribe of Judah and up until this time, his capital was a city of Judah. Saul had been from Benjamin, and had made his hometown into the center of power. But Jerusalem did not belong to any of the tribes – it was held by the Jebusites. So when David captured it, it became a city for all Israelites. No tribe could claim it, and no tribe would be offended that it was the capital city. It belonged to no one, and yet at the same time, to everyone. It was not quite centrally located, but it was close.

By the way, some secular archaeologists dispute the existence of David (they choose to ignore the incredible documentary reliability of the Old Testament). However, a water shaft from the spring of Gihon leading up to Mount Zion was discovered in the 1860s. It doesn’t have David’s name on it, of course, but once more, the Bible told us of it before archeologists discovered it. In the 1980’s archaeologists were convinced that this shaft was dug after the time of David. But more recent work suggests that the water tunnel originally occurred naturally, long before David’s time.

The point is, the book of Samuel describes things that are actually still there. In a sense you might say that if the bible is right, there should be evidence of a water shaft in that location, and sure enough, there is not only evidence, but the actual tunnel itself.

As always, I think it is helpful when we read the Old Testament, to ask “where is Jesus here? How does this reveal Jesus to me?” Well, Jesus, is the rightful king of every Christian. That is God’s desire for us. He should be the ruler over everything in our lives. But even though David was chosen by God to be the king, he waited patiently until the people accepted that and submitted their lives to him joyfully. Even though the Lordship of Jesus is God’s will for us, we have not all submitted to that. Jesus is waiting patiently for us to submit all areas of our lives joyfully to him. Does Jesus determine how you spend your money? Does he determine how you spend your time or energy? Is it the words of Jesus that you speak to your family and friends and co-workers?

Jesus should be king over our lives for some of the same reasons that the Israelites gave for submitting to David. Jesus is fully God, yes, but he is also our flesh and blood – he is fully human, just like us. Hebrews 2:14-18 says:

14 Now since the children have flesh and blood in common, Jesus also shared in these, so that through His death He might destroy the one holding the power of death — that is, the Devil — 15 and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death. 16 For it is clear that He does not reach out to help angels, but to help Abraham’s offspring. 17 Therefore, He had to be like His brothers in every way, so that He could become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 18 For since He Himself was tested and has suffered, He is able to help those who are tested. (Heb 2:14-18, HCSB)

Jesus is our flesh and blood. He belongs to us and we to him. In Jesus, God became more accessible, more understandable, by taking on, forever, human nature. He has a right to be the king of humans, because he is a human. He can sympathize with us and understand our struggles.

Second, Jesus is the originator and creator of everything. He is our protector and sustainer. He has already helped us, already served us, already kept us safe. He has already suffered and died on our behalf. By virtue of how he has already served us, he deserves to be our Lord.

Finally, it is God’s desire that we surrender entirely to Jesus (Philippians 2:9-11). He is the rightful and chosen king of our lives. This is God’s desire – that we allow Jesus to live his life through us, as the owner of our lives. If you feel a little frustrated for David that it took the Israelites so long to accept what God was doing, consider accepting what God wants for your own life!

What about the conquering of Jerusalem? Does that tell us anything about Jesus and his work in our own lives?

Sometimes we really want Jesus to be king over all our lives, but there are parts of our lives that seem like they will never be changed. Maybe you think you will never be able to stop drinking. Some folks struggle with other particular sins that they feel they can never conquer. Perhaps you think, “I am a person who easily gets depressed. That’s just who I am. Nothing is going to change that.” Or, “I’m angry. That’s just my nature, and it’s never going to change.” We might feel like there are parts of our lives that Jesus simply won’t be able to conquer, places where we just can’t let him be king.  Maybe you feel like that about some loved one in your life. You think “Jesus can never get into his life.”

The Jebusites thought they were invulnerable. They had an impressive fortress. But one crack, big enough to fit one man at a time, led to their downfall, and then the city belonged to the king. Jesus is a warrior like David. He is wise and cunning like David. If there is just one little crack, one place where you can say “yes” to Jesus, he can exploit it, and use it to conquer the evil in your life. He can get to people that you think are invulnerable to him.

So if you are concerned about someone else in your life, I say trust him. Ask him to do his work on your loved one. And if the problem is in your own life, I say, simply give him a “yes.” Find some way to say “yes, Jesus. I don’t think I can ever give up drinking [or whatever], but I give you permission to try and take over that part of my life.” Watch what he can do if  you just give him the tiny crack of your willingness.

So, where you can, welcome Jesus as your king. Surrender your life to him, submit to him. Let it be his life from now on. And where you can’t do that, where there is a fortress around your heart, just give him a tiny crack. Just be willing for him to make the attempt.

How is the Holy Spirit speaking to you today?

2 SAMUEL #3. BREAKING MARRIAGE.

On By Pastor TomIn 2 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, marriage, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, Uncategorized3 Comments

In the areas of marriage, family and sexuality, David gave in to cultural pressure. He accepted the attitude of the surrounding culture, and it led to deep heartache and strife for himself personally, and also chaos for the entire nation of Israel. Today, we Christians face tremendous cultural pressure in the areas of marriage, family and sexuality. Let’s learn from the example of David, and instead of conforming to the culture, live as God’s faithful people, even when that looks strange to those around us. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can do this, even when we make mistakes.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download 2 Samuel Part 3

Second Samuel Chapters one through five give us the history of a half-hearted civil war between Saul’s family and David’s followers. We looked at some of the details of that during our first two installments of this series on 2 Samuel. But right in the middle, chapter three interrupts the war narrative to tell us briefly about the sons that David had during this time, and about his wives. There are some significant things to say about this interlude. Some of it might be hard to hear. You might even be offended by what I am going to say. If you do feel upset by what I teach, please do two things:

  • First, please read through to the very end of the sermon, so you hear everything I say, not just a small piece of it. Consider listening to the whole thing with the audio file, because I can convey some things by tone of voice that I can’t with the written word.
  • Second, feel free to disagree with me. If I am wrong, I want to know it. But let our disagreement be about what the Bible actually teaches. Don’t just tell me (or yourself) I’m wrong. Look at the Bible yourself, and understand what it teaches about this topic (which is marriage). If you think I have misunderstood what the Bible says about this, I want to hear it, to correct my mistakes. Use the comments, or contact section and explain to me, from the Bible, why I am mistaken. I’m serious. I don’t think I’m infallible.

All right, let’s get to the text. Six sons of David are named in 3:2-5, and each one came from a different wife. The Old Testament does not offer many outright condemnations of polygamy. Yet it unflinchingly and consistently records the negative results of having more than one spouse. And there are passages that warn against polygamy, even especially for kings.

Of David’s sons named in this passage, Chileab, Ithream and Shephatiah are mentioned only here in the history of Israel (though the same passage is repeated in 1 Chronicles 3). It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that they died in infancy or childhood; because of their absence in later genealogies it is virtually certain that they died before they themselves had children. David’s three surviving sons demonstrate the brokenness that results from ignoring God’s intended plan for marriage and families.

The first surviving son is Amnon. When he grew up he raped his half-sister Tamar. Absalom, the second one (and from a different mother), had Amnon murdered for what he did to his sister. Later, he started a civil war with his father David, and made him flee for his life. Eventually, Absalom was killed during his rebellion. The third son was Adonijah, a schemer who also tried to seize control of the kingdom when David was old and weak. He was ultimately executed by his half-brother Solomon (who is not mentioned here because he was not born until later).

In other words, this business of multiple wives did not work out so well. It led to tremendous family strife. When the bible describes God’s people having more than one wife, it always also describes that the resulting family was a serious mess. This is just one example.

There is one more note in chapter three concerning marriage. In verses 13-16 David demanded that his first wife Michal, Saul’s daughter, be returned to him. It is true that at one time it seemed like David and Michal were in love (1 Samuel 18:20). But the marriage had been dissolved a long time ago by this point. During the years when David was on the run, Saul had Michal marry another man, named, Palti. So, why did David force Michal to come back and become his wife again?

I suspect it was for two reasons, both of them ugly. First, the main written scripture at this point was the Torah (the first five books of our Bible). The Torah made it clear that women are equal in worth to men, and are equal heirs and partners as the people of God. However, the people of Israel took their cues about gender relationships from the surrounding culture rather than from the scripture. In other ancient middle-eastern cultures, women were considered property, like slaves and animals. David probably saw Michal as his own rightful property, and he wanted that property restored to him.

Second, David might have been concerned that if Michal had a son with her second husband (Palti), either the son, or Palti, might claim that, as a grandson of Saul, he was Saul’s rightful heir, and therefore the rightful king of Israel, rather than David. David wanted to avoid yet another civil war.

On a slightly more positive note, it may have also been an attempt to solidify the unity of his kingdom – joining the house of Saul and the house of David once more. But there was tragedy here. Michal’s new husband, Palti, loved her very much. He followed her all the way to the borders of David’s area, weeping because he was losing her. This was an awful, tragic event.

It is a fact that David had many wives, and many children by them. It is also a fact that the resulting family was full of greed, lust, hatred, murder, mayhem and grief. David was a man after God’s heart in many ways. But in his role as a husband and father, he failed spectacularly, as men of power and fame frequently do.

The strife in his family began with the fact that David ignored God’s plan for marriage, which is laid out clearly in Genesis 1 and 2. Those chapters describe marriage as the joining of one man and one woman for life. Genesis chapter two teaches that human beings were generally created to reflect God’s image in this way. Once David ignored that, things went downhill. We might excuse him for marrying again after being separated from Michal. That divorce was beyond his control. But he continued to add wives like state-stickers on the back of a retired couple’s RV.

In those days, polygamy (that is the name for having more than one wife) was a sign that the polygamist was rich and powerful. Many wives were a sign of status, sort of like a brand new Mercedes-Benz these days, only more expensive. It was expected that powerful men would have many wives. I believe that part of David’s motivation in marrying so many women was to gain respect in the eyes of his followers and in the eyes of foreign leaders. I’m sure he was also happy to have sex with many different women, while claiming he was not sinning. The truth is, David caved in to cultural pressure about marriage. And in doing so, he ignored a very clear warning from Moses that even kings were not to take many wives:

14 “When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you, take possession of it, live in it, and say, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations around me,’ 15 you are to appoint over you the king the LORD your God chooses…  …17 He must not acquire many wives for himself so that his heart won’t go astray. He must not acquire very large amounts of silver and gold for himself. (Deut 17:14 & 17, HCSB)

There is a lot of cultural pressure on godly marriage these days also. A newer, and growing trend is the idea of never marrying in the first place. In popular culture, marriage is often portrayed as restricting and repressive, an instrument of oppression and injustice, something that cramps your individual style. So, women are taught to think that marriage will diminish them. Men are encouraged to think that marriage will lead to no more sex, or to the undermining of their manhood. Both men and women are often presented with very negative ideas about marriage by TV, movies, the internet and music. This has a noticeable affect on our culture: the number of people who have never married is increasing dramatically.

There is, unfortunately, some truth to those ideas. Some men do dominate their wives. Sometimes they limit them, and hold them back. Some women do withhold sex from their husbands, and others are controlling and domineering. But all of that is the result of the fact that people are sinful, not that the idea of marriage in itself is flawed or wrong. Those things are much like polygamy: some people think it’s OK to be that way in marriage, but the Bible disagrees.

One of the biggest cultural pressures on marriage today is divorce. Divorce is just as much against God’s design for marriage as is polygamy, and these other things. If you think it was wrong for David to have several wives, then biblically speaking, you’d better admit that divorce is wrong too.

I feel that I ought to say something about sex here as well. The Bible gives all human beings two options with regard to sexual expression. The first option is to remain celibate, and channel sexual energy into the pursuit of God, and work, and creativity. This option is for everyone who is not in a heterosexual marriage. Jesus clearly taught this, but also he taught that not everyone has what it takes to live a life of single celibacy. (Matthew 19:1-12). The second option is to marry one person of the opposite sex, and remain sexually available and faithful to that person for life. Being sexually available to your spouse is a part of what it means to be sexually faithful (1 Corinthians 7:1-8). When Jesus taught these things, they were not especially counter-cultural. Today, they are very different from the way our culture thinks.

What was counter-cultural then, and remains so now, is the reason God created marriage. He did so first so that marriage would help human beings understand a little bit about what God is like (Genesis 1:27; Genesis 2:23-25; 1 Corinthians 11:3), and what Christ’s relationship to the church is like (Ephesians 5:22-33). Secondly, God created marriage for the benefit of human beings. All of history points to the fact that when marriage is stable, children and families flourish. And when families flourish, communities thrive. And when communities thrive, civilization is built, and the foundation is solid. Most, if not all, of the very serious problems facing western cultures today can be traced back to the fact that we have devalued marriage.

The nation of Israel flourished for a time, but ultimately it abandoned God and fell to pieces because it did not listen to, or practice, what scripture teaches about marriage.

Just as David’s culture thought polygamy was normal, our culture looks at divorce, and many other non-biblical things, as normal. I don’t think Christians need to try to change the laws. We ought to try to bring people into a relationship with Jesus so that their hearts are changed. Laws about marriage are mostly irrelevant. We need to concern ourselves with what God’s Word tells us.

There are loopholes in the law that allow unscrupulous people and companies to legally cheat and scam others. Does that mean it is OK for Christians to make money by doing those things?  Of course not. Legality is not the same as morality. The law in Nevada says prostitution is legal there. Does that mean it is OK for a Christian woman to choose that for a career – as long as she lives in Nevada? Of course not. Government laws are not the same as God’s standards, and we can’t expect them to be. In the same way, it doesn’t matter what any human government says about marriage. What God says is the only relevant thing, and Jesus was sky-clear about marriage:

3 Some Pharisees approached [Jesus] to test Him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on any grounds? ”

 4 “Haven’t you read,” He replied, “that He who created them in the beginning made them male and female,” 5 and He also said: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?  6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate.”

 7 “Why then,” they asked Him, “did Moses command us to give divorce papers and to send her away? ”

 8 He told them, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts. But it was not like that from the beginning. 9 And I tell you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

It might be nice if our legal system reflected our Christian morality. But there are already so many places in which it does not. If we make disciples and Jesus changes the hearts of people, they will do what is right, even if the law says it is OK to do wrong.

I wish Christians in America would quit fussing about things like gay marriage or trans issues, and instead let their hearts be broken in repentance over divorce, and over our failure to really submit to Jesus in all areas of our lives, especially marriage.

Now, what if you have already had a divorce and have remarried? I’ve said it in previous messages, and I’ll say it again: These instructions are for you right now. What’s past is past. All of us have made mistakes, and we all have to live with the consequences. Receive the forgiveness and acceptance of Jesus, and move on. Live each present moment in step with the Holy Spirit. Maybe you got a divorce even after you knew that your situation did not meet the criteria Jesus gave (above). In other words, you knowingly and deliberately sinned by divorcing when you did. Again, I say to you, receive the grace and forgiveness of God, and move on. If you are married now, regardless of which number your marriage is, stay married to this one. Make it work, starting now. I think this principle is illustrated (in a negative way) by what David did to Michal. He tore her away from a man who deeply loved her. David destroyed another marriage and another family by trying to “undo” his divorce. The whole thing was a big disaster, as divorce always is. We’ll learn later that neither he nor Michal were happy about how it worked out after they were married again. So don’t try to undo your present marriage, whether it is your first or your fifth.

If your present marriage is truly intolerable (but keep in mind that we often exaggerate how bad it is) then it does appear that you can get divorced without sinning – as long as you never marry anyone but your present spouse again. In other words, for a Christian, divorce should lead to a lifetime of celibate singleness, or reconciliation with your estranged spouse. The one exception where a person is free to get divorced and marry someone else is explained by Jesus – if your spouse (not you) commits adultery. Even there, Jesus does not say that you must divorce – only that you may. Again, I am not speaking about things that happened in the past. Receive the grace of God in your past mistakes, and live in his grace in the present.

Before you decide that your present marriage is intolerable, I want to suggest to you that marriage is kind of a living thing. Things will get difficult, or even bad – for a while. They always do. Things might even be bad for a period of years. But your marriage will also get better, if you keep working at it. If you stay with it, that is inevitable too. And then it will get rocky, and then better again. That’s life. Marriage is the most intimate relationship available to human beings. Two sinful human beings relating that closely are bound to cause trouble for each other. But they can also be a source of incredible strength and joy to each other, if they stick with it. At its best, marriage gives us glimpses into the very nature of God. At its worst, it forces us to confront our own flaws and foibles, and maybe gives us a glimpse into the heartache that the Lord feels when we turn away from him. Either way, it’s a good thing. Notice I didn’t say easy but rather, good.

I want to add one more thing. I think Kari and I have a good marriage. Other people probably think we do also. So keep that in mind when I tell you that we have sought marriage counseling a number of times during our three decades together. Marriage is difficult, because it is a lifetime bond between two people who each have sinful flesh. Our society makes marriage even more difficult for a variety of reasons. Many people have been called and gifted by God to help others improve their marriages. There is no shame in getting their help, and in fact, I think there is a great deal of wisdom in doing that. If you are in a rough period with your spouse, if you haven’t made progress for a while, please consider seeing a Christian marriage counselor together. Christian marriage counselors are part of the body of Christ, with unique gifts from God to help. Again, if you think Kari and I have a good marriage, consider that perhaps one of the reasons we do is because we aren’t ashamed to get help.

When David ignored God’s plan for marriage, it led to disaster for his children. Not only did his children suffer, but many around them suffered also. In other words, David’s disregard of God’s view of marriage was not merely a personal choice that affected only him – in his case it affected hundreds of people. In fact, his son Solomon followed in David’s polygamous footsteps and it destroyed an entire nation of people. So David’s bad choices continued to have negative effects for generations.

As the years go by, I feel more and more uncomfortable teaching like this. Twenty-five years ago when I would preach about marriage I worried that a few people might take it the wrong way and be upset. Ten years ago, I worried quite a bit more. Today, I am not worried, but rather, certain, that many people will be very troubled by this sermon. I could be “cancelled,” publicly shamed, for repeating what the Bible says.

I’m sure David was also under a lot of pressure to conform to his culture. Everyone around him accepted polygamy, especially for a man in his situation. But I believe that if David had been truly willing to follow the Lord in this area of his life, the Holy Spirit would have given him the strength to do so. I know the same is true for us. The grace of God is always available to us to help us in our struggles – all we have to do is submit to God’s design and reach out for that grace. Let me reiterate, that does not mean that things will always be easy. But it does mean that the Lord walks with us through difficult times. Sometimes, as I just mentioned, that grace might come from Christian marriage counselors.

Again, this type of thing gets harder and harder to say in public with each passing year. However, I will not water down the word of God. Marriage is very important to God. It is supposed to be between one man and one woman for life.

At the same time, please do hear me when I say that the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. Jesus has taken our sins on himself, and given us his righteous nature. So, there is no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus. We have God’s approval through Jesus, and  we should not wallow in our mistakes, or beat ourselves up about our past. We can move forward, joyfully and at peace.

Let the Holy Spirit speak to you right now.

2 SAMUEL #2: TRUSTING GOD IN TIMES OF CONFUSION AND HATE

On By Pastor TomIn 2 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

When we belong to Jesus, we can, and should, be gracious even to those who consider themselves to be our enemies. In our text today, many people resisted God’s choice for king. For a long time, it seemed that David’s enemies were successful. Ultimately, even with all the people who wanted something different, David still became the king, and it was the best possible thing – even for all the people who did not want him at first. Sometimes we resist God’s Lordship in our lives. It would be better for us than us running things ourselves, but we fight it anyway. It is better for us in the long run to trust the Lord to work things out.

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2 SAMUEL #2. 2 SAMUEL 2:8-4:12

Last time we considered some of the events of 2 Samuel, chapters 1-5. Mostly, we learned how at first, David only received part of the kingdom that he felt he was destined to lead. Today, we will go over those same verses, and deal with some more of the details.

Chapters two through five of second Samuel describe the years after David was made king of Judah, but before he became king of all Israel. There is some natural confusion about the time period involved, because the text puts it like this:

8 Abner son of Ner, commander of Saul’s army, took Saul’s son Ish-bosheth and moved him to Mahanaim. 9 He made him king over Gilead, Asher, Jezreel, Ephraim, Benjamin — over all Israel. 10 Saul’s son Ish-bosheth was 40 years old when he began his reign over Israel; he ruled for two years. The house of Judah, however, followed David. 11 The length of time that David was king in Hebron over the house of Judah was seven years and six months. (2Sam 2:8-11, HCSB)

We are going to go into the political history of all this for a moment. 3000 year old politics might seem confusing, irrelevant and boring to you. But please bear with me, for a short time, because I think once we understand the politics, we will actually understand better what the Lord wants to say to us today.

Ish-bosheth (try to say that name quickly!) was the only son of Saul who was still alive. He was clearly not king for the entire time of David’s reign over Judah alone. To put it another way, for five of the years that David was king over Judah, the rest of Israel had no king at all. Those five years may have been split between a time before Ish-bosheth’s rule and after. Or they might have come all before-hand, or all after. There is no way to tell for sure, but here is my guess:

After Saul’s death there was a great deal of confusion among the northern tribes of Israel. Many Israelites were now living in subservience to the Philistines, who had conquered a good portion of the country. The others had no leader or central organization to turn to for national identity. Remember, Saul was the very first king of Israel, and just a generation or so before him, the people had no king, no single leader. So when Saul died, and three of his four sons with him, the tribes reverted back to how they had lived before-hand – as a federation of tribes, loosely connected, but without a strong national identity. Some of them may have recalled Samuel’s warnings about having a king – and they had seen that Saul didn’t work out so well. So I suspect that there were several years immediately following Saul’s death without any strong desire or impetus to get another king.

In the meantime, the writer of the book of Samuel says that there was a war between Saul’s family and David’s. The text says that Abner became more and more powerful in the family of Saul (3:6). Abner was Saul’s  nephew or cousin, depending on how you read the Hebrew. He had also been Saul’s chief war-leader. It looks as though after Saul’s death it was mainly Abner and his ambitions who opposed David’s kingship over all Israel. It took Abner some time to pull all his plans together. David was king for probably five years, while Abner blocked his every attempt to lead the whole nation. Meanwhile Abner himself was making connections, re-establishing a national identity, and finally setting up Saul’s son as the new king, but with himself as the real power-holder.

I think there are several understandable (but not justifiable) reasons for Abner’s actions. As Saul’s chief general, he had been the second most powerful man in Israel. With Saul dead and everything in confusion, all that went away. I think Abner wanted to go back to the way it was. I think he loved the power and position and wealth, and he was trying to regain it. In addition, Abner had been Saul’s right-hand man since the beginning. He was already there when David killed Goliath (1 Samuel 17:55-58). So I imagine he had completely internalized Saul’s attitude toward David. Along with that, he may have felt that David was just like him – a great warrior, to be sure, but not a king. They had served Saul together for a short time – who was David to now pretend he was a king? Why did David think he was better than everyone else? He was a warrior, just like Abner, not a king. In fact, during the time David served Saul, Abner might have been jealous, and he may have worried that David would take his place. Finally, remember when Saul was hunting David, and David and his nephew Abishai stole Saul’s spear and water-bottle? Afterwards, they mocked Abner in front of Saul and his men. So there may have been some personal animosity there also, fueling Abner’s ambitions.

At some point, Abner was finally able to get the other Israelites to declare Ish-bosheth king over “all Israel.” But I think realistically, we have to assume that Ish-bosheth was more or less just a figurehead. The real driving force behind the civil war and behind Ish-bosheth’s monarchy was Abner. In fact, we see this reflected when Ish-bosheth was afraid to argue with Abner (3:11), and also because once Abner died, the whole thing fell apart.

Now, I want to pause for a moment to consider this. It seems to me that Abner was not a very admirable man. Later on, we’ll see that he was completely willing to switch his allegiance to David when he realized that David was going to win. Abner was an unscrupulous political hatchet-man looking only for his own gain and ambition. We have plenty of people like that today. Modern-day politics drives me crazy, because the people in power seem to get there and hold onto their power through blatant dishonesty, corruption and scheming. Sometimes it helps me to calm down when I realize that this sort of thing has been going on for at least three-thousand years, since Abner lived that long ago.

But there is more than that here for us. Abner was a scoundrel. For five years, he carried out his schemes successfully. For two more years, it seemed that he had achieved his ambition. For seven years total, it seemed that he had thwarted David and thwarted God. And yet all the work that Abner did for himself and his selfish ambitions ended up serving God’s purposes and plans for David.

You see, the nation was fractured after the death of Saul. It was Abner who reunited them. It was he who encouraged them to return to a sense of national identity. It was Abner who got Israel to commit once more to having one king over the whole nation. And once that was done, God handed that united kingdom over to his chosen servant, David.

If David had become king right after Saul, he would have inherited a kingdom that was disorganized, disheartened and fractured. He would have had to do the work of rallying the tribes and unifying them. But instead, he simply watched while Abner did the work for him, and then God turned it over to him.

This is incredibly encouraging for me. There are long periods of time in my life where I think that God’s will is being thwarted, or that evil is prevailing, and unscrupulous people are successful. But God knows what  he is doing. He will use it all, sooner or later, to accomplish his purposes. Not even a man who gained control of an entire nation through dirty politics can stop God from working. And it turns out that all that selfish evil work was turned into God’s work.

Let’s continue on with the historical events. After Ish-bosheth became king, there was a significant battle between his men and David’s. The location of this battle, and of Ish-bosheth’s headquarters, is telling. The battle took place in the heart of the territory belonging to Benjamin – the tribe of Saul, Ish-bosheth and Abner. However, Ish-bosheth’s headquarters were located far to the east, across the Jordan valley. This means that by this point, David’s kingdom of Judah was starting to dominate the surrounding areas. It wasn’t safe for Abner and Ish-bosheth to be based in the territory of their own tribe.

The rest of chapter 2 describes the battle, beginning with the tragic death of twelve young men from each side. If your response is “that’s horrible,” then you got the message. After the twenty-four young men killed each other, the men of Judah fell upon Abner’s men and crushed them. Abner and his forces flat out ran away.

During the chase, David’s nephew Asahel fixed his sights upon Abner. Asahel was the brother of Abishai, the man who went into Saul’s camp with David, and stole Saul’s water jug and spear (1 Samuel 26). His other brother was Joab who was David’s chief war-leader. All three of them were the sons of David’s sister Zeruiah. Remember, it is likely that even though they were David’s nephews, all four of them were probably pretty close in age.

Asahel was apparently an unusually fast runner. He probably knew that Abner was the main force behind this war, and Asahel seemed determined to kill him. Perhaps he wanted to win great honor, like his other brothers had. He might also have thought that if he killed Abner, it would end the war altogether.

Now, we come to the curious sense of honor that often restrained the brutality of war in those days. Abner saw Asahel pursuing him. He knew who Asahel was, and he warned him off.

18 Joab, Abishai, and Asahel—the three sons of Zeruiah—were among David’s forces that day. Asahel could run like a gazelle, 19 and he began chasing Abner. He pursued him relentlessly, not stopping for anything. 20 When Abner looked back and saw him coming, he called out, “Is that you, Asahel?”
“Yes, it is,” he replied.
21 “Go fight someone else!” Abner warned. “Take on one of the younger men, and strip him of his weapons.” But Asahel kept right on chasing Abner.
22 Again Abner shouted to him, “Get away from here! I don’t want to kill you. How could I ever face your brother Joab again?” (2 Samuel 2:18-22, NLT)

Nowadays we think in terms of total war. But war in those days was a curious mixture of unimaginable brutality combined with strangely restraining rules of honor. Abner and Joab have just been commanding their men to kill each other in hand to hand combat – the most brutal, personal kind of war there is. And yet, Abner now was extremely reluctant to kill one of the chief leaders of the enemy. However, Asahel would not stop. So finally Abner did. The language seems to indicate that Abner stopped with his spear sticking out, butt-first behind him. He might have stuck the sharp point into the ground to brace it. His intent was probably to knock the wind out of Asahel, and bruise him to the point where he would stop pursuing him. But Asahel was running so fast that the blunt end of the spear pierced him through the body and killed him.

The pursuit continued until Abner rallied his men on a hilltop. He called to Joab to stop, and again, following those curious rules of war, Joab agreed to let them go.

Not long after all of that, Abner had a falling-out with king Ish-bosheth. I think he could see the writing on the wall, and he knew that David was going to prevail. The argument with Ish-bosheth was the final breaking point, and Abner decided to change his allegiance, to gain power in David’s new kingdom. He openly promised Ish-bosheth that he was going to turn the whole kingdom over to David. Chapter 3, verse 11 shows us that Ish-bosheth was indeed merely a figurehead, while Abner held the real power:

11 Ish-bosheth could not answer Abner because he was afraid of him. (2Sam 3:11, HCSB)

After this, Abner opened negotiations with David. He came to visit David in Hebron, and he left just before David’s nephew and war-leader, Joab, got back from a trip. Remember, Asahel, whom Abner recently killed in the battle, was Joab’s younger brother. Joab was full of bitterness and rage about it. Unknown to David, Joab sent messengers to Abner to bring him back. Abner believed he was there under the agreement of truce and safe passage that David had made with him. So he was taken by surprise when Joab pulled him aside and stabbed him, killing him. It was a nasty, cowardly deed, not at all like it would have been if Joab had killed Abner in battle.

David’s reaction to Abner’s death was just like his reaction to Saul’s death. I don’t think David had any illusions about what kind of man Abner was. He had known him for a long time, and Abner had been trying as hard as Saul to put an end to David. Even so, David refused to treat him like an enemy. Instead, he deplored the actions of Joab. David immediately declared that what Joab had done was wrong, and he prayed for God to repay him for it. He made Joab tear his clothes and mourn for Abner, the man who had killed his brother. He publicly praised Abner, and publicly condemned Joab.

David was clearly not concerned with what people thought about him. He was concerned about what was right and wrong.

Not long after this, with no Abner there to hold things together, Ish-bosheth was betrayed and killed. The murderers brought David his head, believing that David would be pleased to have his rival dead. But David treated them just as he had the Amalekite who claimed to have killed Saul – he had them executed.

This makes three times in five chapters that David punished people who claimed to have killed his enemies. I think we need to pay attention to it. Saul was clearly David’s enemy – he tried to kill him numerous times. Abner was clearly David’s enemy – he too tried to kill David by way of helping Saul, and then Ish-bosheth. Ish-bosheth was also technically David’s enemy.

And yet David mourned each of these men. He reacted strongly and negatively to those who caused their deaths. He was not pleased when they died, and he was not pleased with those who killed them. We have seen that David is a man with many faults and failings. But we have also seen that however imperfect, he was a man with a real and living faith in the real and living God. The Lord often used David to show us the Lord’s own heart.

David maintained a gracious perspective. He could look beyond personal rivalry, jealousy and even personal attacks. In the end, David was never willing to consider another Israelite – one of God’s chosen people – to be his enemy. In fact, when we read these chapters carefully, we find that David himself never participated in these battles against other Israelites. David wasn’t stupid. He knew that his enemies hated him, and were fearful and ambitious. But he never took it personally, and he didn’t consider the people themselves to be his enemies.

So let’s think about how to apply these chapters to our own lives.

I am working on this sermon about ten days after someone tried to kill former-president Donald Trump. Political tensions are very high right now. Friendships and families are being split apart by people with strong feelings about politics. In this moment, I think we can learn a lot from David. David trusted God to convince those that needed to be convinced. David seemed genuinely and deeply upset when his enemies were killed. We too, can trust God when it comes to people who disagree with us. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, I think all Christians should be sad about such a terrible thing happening in our culture. If you wish Trump had actually been killed, shame on you! I think you might need to repent of that. In the same way, I think we should also be sad that President Biden has become too feeble to go on campaigning for reelection. It’s one thing to make a sober judgment that he is no longer fit to be president. But if you are actually happy that his health has declined so much, shame on you! You might need to repent. We Christians belong to the God of the universe, who loves all people. Even when those who claim to hate us are killed, or otherwise hurt, we should be sad, not glad.

We can afford to be gracious, because we belong to a gracious God. I am not suggesting that you cannot hold strong opinions, or that we need to pretend to agree with everything anyone says.  But our disagreements should be kept in perspective. Politicians have been saying for years that if the other side wins, it will be the end of America as we know it. Unfortunately, that tradition goes back to the first presidential election after George Washington retired. And yet, we’re still here. Don’t believe their lies. Maintain your perspective.

There is another piece of this. Sometimes we get caught up in personality conflicts, and we become very upset at other humans who frustrate or oppose us. But the real enemies are the demonic forces that only use and influence other humans (Ephesians 6:12). Other human beings are not the enemy. Particularly, if we follow the example of David, other Christians may often be misled and used by the devil, but they are never our real enemies.

I am also encouraged to not be overly stressed when people I distrust are succeeding and growing in power. If I was David, I would have been very concerned about Abner and his schemes. I would have been upset that for seven years Abner apparently succeeded (seven years is almost as long as two presidential administrations). But David simply trusted God and waited. The ultimate result is that his enemy Abner did a lot of hard work on David’s behalf, and David got to reap the benefits – all for God’s glory. We don’t know when David wrote Psalm 37, but it certainly could have been shortly after these times:

1 Don’t worry about the wicked
or envy those who do wrong.
2 For like grass, they soon fade away.
Like spring flowers, they soon wither.
3 Trust in the LORD and do good.
Then you will live safely in the land and prosper.
4 Take delight in the LORD,
and he will give you your heart’s desires.
5 Commit everything you do to the LORD.
Trust him, and he will help you.
6 He will make your innocence radiate like the dawn,
and the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun.
7 Be still in the presence of the LORD,
and wait patiently for him to act.
Don’t worry about evil people who prosper
or fret about their wicked schemes.
8 Stop being angry!
Turn from your rage!
Do not lose your temper—
it only leads to harm.
9 For the wicked will be destroyed,
but those who trust in the LORD will possess the land. (Psalms 37:1-9, NLT)

Abner, and to some degree the other Israelites, either resisted, or passively ignored God’s choice for king. Ultimately, David still became the king, and it was the best possible thing – even for all the people who did not want him at first. Sometimes we resist God’s Lordship in our lives. It would be better for us than us running things ourselves, but we fight it anyway. It is better for us in the long run to let God have his way.

1 SAMUEL #29: WHATEVER WORKS

On By Pastor TomIn 1 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, SermonLeave a comment

Saul was committed, above all, to being in control of his own life and getting the results he wanted. When it appeared to him that God wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he turned to the devil for it. Demanding self control or results is a dangerous path to walk down for anyone. The alternative to the need to be in control is trust in God. Let this scripture lead you into a deeper level of trust in the Lord.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

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1 SAMUEL #29. 1 SAMUEL 28:1-25

Remember all that we have learned about king Saul. One of the most important things we discovered is that he was a religious man, but not a man of faith. Time after time, when he felt he could somehow use or exploit God, he did so. But when he was confident in himself, or when he felt that God had nothing to offer him, he ignored God. He had the trappings of religion and he used them to try to control others and manipulate God. But he did not live in a day to day walk of faith, trusting God in all things, relating to him, loving him. The depths of Saul’s spiritual poverty are revealed in 1 Samuel chapter 28.

Saul, having no real trust in God, was terrified when he saw the Philistine army that came against him. Now consider something. Every time Saul was involved in a battle with the Philistines up to this point, God saved the Israelites. The Lord used Jonathan in chapter 13, and David in chapter 17, and several other times. But none of that seemed to make any difference to Saul. He was just as scared and faithless as he had always been.

I want to pause and say something about that here. Sometimes we think that if God just did a miracle for us, then we would really trust him. If we saw the Lord do something really great, then we wouldn’t doubt, then we wouldn’t disobey or draw back in fear. But that wasn’t the case with Saul. God’s previous miracles didn’t matter. The same was true with the first Israelites who came out of Egypt. They saw many miracles. Their food and water were daily miracles. And yet it did not help them to have faith and surrender to the Lord.

Jesus addressed this issue in his own ministry. Though he did many miracles, often people came and demanded more miracles on the spot – basically asking him to prove himself to them—again. Jesus addressed this in Luke 11:27-29:

27 As He was saying these things, a woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, “The womb that bore You and the one who nursed You are blessed! ” 28 He said, “Even more, those who hear the word of God and keep it are blessed! ” 29 As the crowds were increasing, He began saying: “This generation is an evil generation. It demands a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. (Luke 11:27-29, HCSB)

John records that many miracles (‘signs’) still did not convince people who did not want to be convinced:

37 Even though He had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in Him. (John 12:37, HCSB)

On one occasion, when Jesus told people to trust in him, the people demanded that he prove himself with another miracle—and this was only the next day after the feeding of the five thousand! (John 6:22-31). In another place, Jesus told a story about a poor man named Lazarus, and a rich man. At the end of the story, the rich man found himself in hell. He begged that someone be sent from heaven to tell his family the truth about the afterlife. Jesus concludes the story like this:

31 “But he told him, ‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded if someone rises from the dead.’ ” (Luke 16:31, HCSB)

When people in the New Testament say “Moses and the Prophets” they mean “the Bible,” since that was all of the Bible that they had at that time. What Jesus is saying is this: if you don’t trust God’s Word and the promises in scripture, no amount of miracles will cause you to trust.” The problem can’t be fixed by a miracle. That is both hard and good for us to remember. Seeing is not believing. With God, believing is seeing.

So Saul, in spite of all that he has seen God do, was a religious pretender, not a man of real faith. All of the amazing ways God had worked throughout his life did not give him real faith. Therefore, now, facing the Philistines, he was quaking in fear. It says that he “inquired of the Lord.” As before, Saul didn’t go to the Lord unless he thought God could do something for him. So now, he inquired of the Lord only out of fear and a desire to manipulate God. It doesn’t tell us what Saul was asking God. I think it is most likely that he made an animal sacrifice to the Lord, and was hoping for some prophecy that God was pleased with the sacrifice, and would give Saul the victory. But he didn’t hear anything by way of the “sacred dice” (the Urim and Thummim) or through the prophets, or from  dreams. Basically, Saul was demanding another sign here (that is, a miracle) before he would really trust God. He had God’s help all his life, but he still wouldn’t trust the Lord without some kind of additional sign.

God was working on Saul all of his life. Remember how he called him to be king? There were several miracles in connection with just that. Remember how he gave Saul the victory at Jabesh Gilead? Remember how even after Saul proved to be useless to God, God kept pursuing Saul’s heart, trying to get him to turn to the Holy Spirit for relief? Saul has had decades to surrender his heart to the Lord. The Lord never quit trying to win him over. I think this lack of a sign was one more chance for Saul to surrender his heart. The Lord put him in a crisis where he had the same two choices he had always had: 1. Trust God, or  2. Manipulate God and other people to control his own destiny, and get the outcome he wants. Before this, Saul had always chosen #2. He didn’t know it, but this was now his last chance to surrender his heart to the Lord.

Tragically, Saul once again chose to try to control his own life and outcomes, rather than trusting God. When he didn’t hear from the Lord, trust was not even an option. Saul felt that he simply must find some way to manipulate God into saying what he wanted to hear, or doing what he wanted God to do. So he sought out a medium, or witch, or spiritist, or whatever you want to call it.

Deuteronomy 18:9-14 says this:

10There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer11or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead,12for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you.13You shall be blameless before the LORD your God,14for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do this.

These practices were part of the reason for Holy War, which Saul failed to carry out as king. Not only were the people of God not supposed to do these things, they were supposed to wipe out those who did. Such things separate people from God and put them under the influence of hell. Saul did make some attempt to stamp out the practice of the occult, but obviously he wasn’t entirely successful. And now he was willing to deliberately abandon faith in God, abandon his own previous laws against these things, and seek help from a medium through “communication with the dead.”

Here is the final proof of Saul’s internal condition. Religion was just something to be used and manipulated. Clearly, for Saul all that mattered is that he got some kind of good result, and if he couldn’t get what he wanted from God, he was willing to seek it from the instruments of the devil.

 So Saul and a few of his men disguised themselves and went to the witch. The disguise was actually pretty pathetic. The woman lived not far from the battlefield. Her visitor was the tallest man she’d ever seen, and he wanted to talk to the ghost of the prophet Samuel. It didn’t take a genius to figure out it was Saul. So at first the woman thought it was a trap. Then when she was convinced, she pretended that the ghost of Samuel told her who Saul was. All that is reading between the lines, but I feel pretty confident about it. You can’t disguise your height, and the Bible tells us that Saul was the tallest man in the whole nation of Israel by far. The witch would have had to be pretty stupid to not think it was Saul.

Now it is natural to wonder, what really happened here? Was the woman a charlatan who made it all up? Was there really a spiritual presence there? And if so, was it really Samuel?

To answer that, we need to consider what the Bible says about life after death. Certainly, the entire New Testament teaches that at the end of time, there will be a judgment day. Those who reject Jesus will be thrown into a lake of fire with the devil and his demons. Those who receive him will be physically resurrected to an eternal, joyful existence.

But there is that period of time in between. Samuel was in that period, as is every person who has died up until today (except for Jesus). Some people believe that in that “between-time,” you are unaware of existence until judgment day, at the end of time. Others believe, as I do, that there is a period of time when dead people are not yet resurrected into new bodies, but their spirits are either with Jesus in joy and freedom, or in hell. The presence of Moses and Elijah with Jesus in Matthew 17, suggests this very strongly. Jesus painted this picture of life after death in his story of Lazarus and the rich man.  Revelation 6:9-11 shows people who have died, yet are aware and are waiting for the final judgment day and the resurrection. Actually several passages in Revelation suggest that there is life with Jesus between death and the physical resurrection that will occur at the end of time.

Therefore in order to believe that it really was the spirit of Samuel, we have to believe that some people on earth – mediums, fortune tellers etc. – have the power to pull people out of the presence of God and back to earth so we can talk to them. I don’t buy it for a second.

However, could God have allowed this to happen for some reason? In my opinion, that just brings up another reason to believe that this was not really Samuel. God chose not to answer Saul when Saul wanted some reassurance. He did not answer through the “holy dice,” or through the prophets or in dreams. If God would chose not to speak to Saul through these holy and righteous means, why would he then work through the unrighteous means of a medium – basically rewarding Saul’s wicked behavior, and giving the impression that, actually, God does work through such things?

Even beyond these most significant facts, there are other things in the text which suggest that this was not Samuel. Saul himself could not see the spirit – he had to ask the medium what he looked like. Her reply was very vague: “An old man wearing robes.” That’s pretty much how I picture Samuel myself. Saul accepted this description as true, but there is nothing in it that actually identifies Samuel personally.

Finally, there is the message that Saul got from this apparition. Once again we need to question why God would speak through this illegitimate means after not answering by any legitimate route. But secondly, listen to the tone of the message. It is angry, bitter and hopeless. There is no encouragement. There is not even any opportunity for repentance. Not too long after this, Saul was wounded and committed suicide, rather than fight on with courage. I personally believe that his encounter contributed to that act.

I do believe that there was something spiritual going on here – something creepy and utterly evil. Remember the other Saul, in the New Testament, the one who repented and came to Jesus, and later was known as Paul? He encountered a girl who could tell the future. But it was an evil spirit that gave her the power of limited fortune telling (Acts 16:16-19). I met someone once who used to be involved in fortune telling, and spirit-communication for money. She became a Christian and rejected all that.

We asked her what was involved in it. She said that sometimes she was just tricking people by being observant, and making vague statements combined with educated guesses. But she also told us that sometimes she was aware of a spiritual presence which gave her information – a presence which she now realizes was a demon.

I personally believe that Saul unknowingly sought (and received) an audience with a demon, masquerading as Samuel. Saul was rewarded with the kind of thing you would expect from a demon: condemnation and hopelessness. By turning to witchcraft and séance to try and control his life, he was turning his back utterly on God and seeking help from hell. And he got exactly what you might expect from hell.

So where to do we go with this text?

First, if this isn’t too obvious, don’t play around with séances, spirit-guides, mediums, psychics and so on. The best case scenario is that you are being fooled by a con-artist. The other possibility is that you are dealing with something that comes from the pit of hell, and you are inviting demonic influence into your life if you fool with it. The Bible says that sometimes Satan (and presumably other demons) masquerade as angels of light:

14 And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. (2 Corinthians 11:14-15, ESV.)

In the context of this verse, “his servants” is about human beings who are trying to lead people astray. But if it is true about humans who have turned from God, it seems likely to be true about demons also. As we can see, the result of fooling around with this for Saul was dramatic and self-destructive. The Bible tells us everything we need to know about God and human nature. It doesn’t tell us everything in the universe there is to know. There are unresolved questions about supernatural things. But the Bible is clear about mediums and seances and so on: they are not for the people of God. It is like playing with explosives.

I also find some reminders here about religion. There are many people like Saul who go to church and talk the religious talk as a way to manipulate God or influence others. It became a way of life for Saul, and ultimately it destroyed him. God never gave up on him, but by his empty religious spirit, Saul took himself out of God’s jurisdiction. I hate religion. I love Jesus, but I hate religion. I think maybe God hates it too. Religion is about appearance and manipulation. Real faith is about surrendering your heart to the One who created you, and cares about you more than anyone else in the universe. Saul had plenty of religion. David had faith.

I also think there is a warning here about being willing to get results, no matter how. I remember, some years ago, hearing a fellow Christian talking about Madonna, the singer. Some of you might be too young to remember, but she started out with a “good girl” image. She didn’t get a lot of success that way. When she switched to being all about sex, she became wildly popular. My Christian friend said: “You gotta admire her for doing what it takes.” I don’t think so at all. We don’t have to admire that, and I think we shouldn’t. Sometimes there are things that are more important than getting the results we want.

Americans tend to be in favor of “whatever works.” Sometimes, that’s a good trait, but sometimes, it isn’t. If drugs and alcohol work to cheer me up, should I abuse them? If I’m unhappy in my marriage, should I have an affair? If I need more money, should I cheat and steal? “Whatever works” is a very dangerous philosophy to have. In the end it destroyed Saul.

There is also a caution here about how we view miracles. The Bible teaches us that they are real. I have personally seen miracles. I love it when God does them. But my faith does not depend on God continually doing more of them for me, and I know I cannot demand them from God whenever I choose. We sometimes think (like Mike and the Mechanics) that all we need is a miracle. Not so. All we need is the Lord, and to get him all we need is faith to believe he is there, and to trust him. Miracles are real, and great, but if we won’t trust God unless he keeps doing more miraculous things for us, I think we are in trouble. Jesus himself warned against that attitude.

I think there are many times when we get ourselves into situations like Saul’s. We come face to face with a problem. We can try to manage and control life ourselves; or we can trust the Lord and surrender to him. I pray that we make the second choice, not the first.

I guess the main message is the same message we hear over and over through scripture: Trust the Lord. Base that trust on his word and his promises, not on anything else. And base your life on the trust you have for Him.

1 SAMUEL #27: DARING DEEDS BY DAVID

On By Pastor TomIn 1 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, Jesus, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, Uncategorized1 Comment
Photo by Belle Co on Pexels.com

Saul had abused his power and mistreated David in several despicable ways. But David’s main complaint was that Saul was cutting him off from worshipping in God’s sanctuary, and from God’s people. Even so, once again David refrained from harming Saul when he had the chance. In this incident David reminds us that we need fellowship with God’s people. He also shows again what Jesus is like: he does not treat us as our sins deserve, but instead showers grace on us unconditionally.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

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1 SAMUEL #27. 1 SAMUEL CHAPTER 26;1-25

Often when I teach through the Bible, I am looking for tightly focused themes and messages in each passage. That works pretty well when we encounter the teaching genre in scripture. But often, when we get to narrative history, I feel like each passage is a box of chocolates: a lot of variety, a few surprises, but all of it is sweet.

I want to point out again David’s precarious situation. He was trying to lead and support 600 men who couldn’t stay in one place. In fact, they couldn’t stay in any civilized place, because the king had declared David an outlaw, under a death sentence. He was dependent upon gifts from friends and strangers. He was also vulnerable to those same people if they chose to betray David and his men. We don’t know for sure how long David lived this way, but it was certainly years – maybe even as long as a decade.

One of the reasons I like to point this out is because many churches and popular preachers seem to suggest that if you have faith in God, everything will always go well for you. By implication, if things do not go well with you, it must be because you don’t have enough faith, or you are not righteous enough. David was an imperfect human being, but he did live in faith. In fact he had a great deal of trust in the Lord, and always repented from his sins, and was willing to humbly learn to do better.

 Even so, for many years, it did NOT go well with David. I just want to make sure that no one reading this ever falls prey to the teaching that if life is tough on you, it is automatically because you don’t have enough faith, or you are a bad Christian or something like that. Sometimes, by our own choices, we do make life harder than it needs to be. But sometimes, life is just hard, for no reason that we can understand. Certainly David had a heart for God and a great deal of integrity, and those did not save him from trouble and hardship.

Also, I want to make sure you don’t believe that you can earn favors from God by being righteous, or saying the right words or having the right kind of faith. We live by God’s grace. If we had to earn God’s favor, no one would ever earn anything good. You don’t understand the gospel if you think you can earn blessings by being righteous, or saying the right things, or having the right kind of faith. David was not the only person in the Bible who had great faith, but a difficult life.

I do want to say, however, that David became the great man he was because of his faith. Sometimes things went very well for him and sometimes they didn’t. But how it was going on the outside was not as important to David as the quality of his relationship with the Lord. And because that relationship was more important to David than anything else, God was able to use him in amazing ways, and also to bless David without David thinking he had earned it.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to receive all of life as blessing, whether or not it looks that way outwardly? If we could do that, it wouldn’t matter much to us whether circumstances were good or bad. We would always be experiencing life as blessing. David was getting there.

In chapter 26, David was still in a time of outward difficulty. But we will quickly see that things were very good with his heart. Once more, the Ziphites betrayed David – the same people who almost got him killed in chapter 23:19. They knew where David was, and they told Saul to come and get him. As far as we know, Saul had left David alone since the incident when David spared his life in the cave. But the Ziphites basically tempted Saul to sin. Having betrayed David once, this group of people probably thought that if David were not killed, he would take retribution on them if he had the chance, so they may have been quite urgent and persuasive in trying to get Saul to start hunting David again.

Apparently, David could hardly believe it, so he took a few men on a reconnaissance mission to see if Saul had really started hunting him again. One of the men he brought with him was Abishai. Abishai was one of the sons of David’s sister Zeruiah, which made him David’s nephew. Abishai’s brother Joab became the commander of David’s armies later on. If you remember, among David’s men eventually there were “the Three” who became outstanding warriors, and then “the Thirty” who were also an elite force of great fighters among David’s other men. Here is what it says about Abishai elsewhere:

18 Abishai, Joab’s brother and son of Zeruiah, was leader of the Three. He raised his spear against 300 men and killed them, gaining a reputation among the Three. 19 Was he not more honored than the Three? He became their commander even though he did not become one of the Three. (2 Samuel 23:18-19, HCSB)

Now, for those of you who are Bible geeks, like me, you might find a translation that says Abishai was commander of the thirty, rather than the three. In fact, the translators of the ESV couldn’t make up their minds about this, and older editions read like the HCSB (above) and newer editions have Abishai as commander of the thirty, rather than the three. The problem is that while most ancient texts read like the HCSB (quoted above) two well regarded ancient texts have it the other way, and it seems to make a bit more sense the other way – how could he be chief of the three, if he wasn’t one of the three? This is one of those “major issues” in Bible translation, but of course, it isn’t really that important. What is clear, no matter which way is correct, is that Abishai is one of the greatest warriors alive during David’s lifetime.

Since David was the youngest of ten, it is possible that even though he was technically Abishai’s uncle the two of them might have been basically the same age. It is even possible that Abishai was a little older. They might have spent a lot of time together as boys. At this point, they were both probably in their early or mid-twenties, in the prime of physical power and maybe a little inclined to try something crazy.

The two of them decided to sneak into the heart of Saul’s encampment at night. This was the desert, so the soldiers probably did not have tents. The picture seems to be that Saul chose his sleeping spot, and then the whole army arranged themselves around him, with his bodyguard closest to him and the rest spread around them generally. David and Abishai crept through the entire group of three thousand sleeping men and came to Saul sleeping soundly, along with Abner, the chief of Saul’s bodyguard.

This incident appears somewhat similar to the one in chapter 24. Certainly, the result, and the main point (David sparing Saul) is virtually the same. However, other than that, almost every detail is different. Saul didn’t come alone into a cave where David and his men were waiting. Instead David crept with only one companion into the middle of Saul’s camp. This time it wasn’t Saul almost finding David where he was hiding, it was David finding Saul where he was camped openly. Before, David was passive. This time he initiated the action.

I think that it is no coincidence that this second opportunity to harm Saul was given to David after his interactions with Nabal and Abigail. In chapter 24, we have the record of how David was tested in the cave with Saul, and he passed that test. But with Nabal, he failed. He fully intended to take matters into his own hands regarding Nabal, and was saved from sin only by the wisdom of Abigail. Now, once more, he gets the chance to either take matters into his own hands, or trust the Lord.

It is almost as if the Lord was giving David a chance to see if he really had learned his lesson from the incident with Nabal. It isn’t just a test – obviously, God already knew what was in David’s heart. But David may not have been sure of himself. He may have had times where he thought about the incident with Nabal, and condemned himself, and wished he had behaved differently. The Lord was giving him a second chance, a “do-over.” In the Torah, it says all legal issues must be established by at least two witnesses. Now there were two occasions that “witnessed” David’s commitment to not harm Saul, and to not take matters into his own hands. Those incidents were witnessed by both Saul’s men, and David’s followers also.

Abishai however, did not yet have David’s wisdom. He asked permission to kill Saul with Saul’s own spear. By the way, in one of Abishai’s exploits (recorded elsewhere) he killed three hundred men with a spear in one battle, so he knew how to use that weapon. He’s not just boasting when he says one thrust would do it. It would be all over. The good times could begin. The days of wandering homeless, despised by people around them, in danger all the time, could all be ended by one swift spear thrust. As before, it was a powerful temptation. Who could blame David? In Saul’s mind, anyway, they were enemies. It would be an act of war. It wouldn’t even be David who struck the blow.

But David had learned his lesson thoroughly. He said:

10“As the LORD lives, the LORD will certainly strike him down: either his day will come and he will die, or he will go into battle and perish. 11 However, because of the LORD, I will never lift my hand against the LORD’s anointed. Instead, take the spear and the water jug by his head, and let’s go.” (1Sam 26:10-11, HCSB)

He saw the battle with Goliath as the Lord’s fight. So now he sees the struggle with Saul. It isn’t his own fight at all, really – it is God’s business, and David trusted God to take care of it in His own time and in His own way.

As morning broke, from a safe distance, David called and awakened the camp. He showed them the spear and the water jug he had taken from Saul’s side. David was young and strong, and he had accomplished an amazing, bloodless feat of arms. So he teased Abner, Saul’s commander for a moment. I get the feeling he was rejoicing in what he and Abishai just did. Maybe he was “crowing” just a little bit. But then, once again he respectfully confronted Saul with his wrongdoing. Like Abigail did with David, so David now did with his king, Saul. He showed Saul he was wrong; he reminded him of true righteousness in God’s eyes – but he did it all with respect. You might say that similar to Abigail’s attitude toward David, David was submissive to the authority of Saul, but he was not subservient or a doormat.

Review the history of abuse Saul has heaped on David: He refused to honor his promises to the conqueror of Goliath. He didn’t reward him with money for killing Goliath, like he had promised to do. He initially didn’t allow David to marry his daughter (as he had promised). Then he made David pay a bride price for the privilege, even though he had promised that killing Goliath satisfied the bride price. He sent David on the most dangerous missions against the Philistines. He threw a spear at him, twice. He tried to have him killed. Then after David fled, several times Saul pursued him with thousands of warriors, to try and kill him.  Even after David spared his life in the cave, here is Saul again, trying to kill him.

But listen to what David’s biggest complaint about Saul is:

For they have driven me from my home, so I can no longer live among the LORD’s people, and they have said, ‘Go, worship pagan gods.’ 20 Must I die on foreign soil, far from the presence of the LORD? (1 Samuel 26:19-20, NLT)

Saul’s worst offense, in David’s eyes, is that he is cutting him off from the people of God. David can’t go and worship at the sanctuary any more. Remember, things were different before Jesus came. God’s presence was in the sanctuary in a special way, and David was denied access to that. This is his biggest concern.

At the end of the discussion, David showed where his trust is:

23 May the LORD repay every man for his righteousness and his loyalty. I wasn’t willing to lift my hand against the LORD’s anointed, even though the LORD handed you over to me today. 24 Just as I considered your life valuable today, so may the LORD consider my life valuable and rescue me from all trouble.” (1Sam 26:23-24, HCSB)

He didn’t ask Saul to treat him the way he treated Saul. Instead, he declared that he trusted the Lord to treat him with righteousness and love.

Throughout this, Saul seemed to be full of remorse. But he was remorseful last time too, after David spared his life in the cave. David has learned something important from Saul: Remorse is not the same as repentance. Saul let his emotions rage through him uncontrolled. Sometimes he was full of murderous fury; sometimes he was full of regret and sorrow. But the regret and sorrow did not lead to true repentance for Saul – they were just feelings he had sometimes. So, even though Saul invited David to come back with him, David did not do it. Saul was in God’s hands, but David was wise enough not to trust him.

It’s another great story, and I love it just for the daring deeds and passion and trust in God. But what does it mean for us now? What does the Lord want to say to us through this passage today?

When I read this at first, I am tempted to see it as a reason to admire David and Abishai. Here are two deadly warriors who, between just the two of them, can overcome hundreds of enemies at a time. And now, they seem to be showing us that in addition to a capacity for incredible violence on the battlefield, they can move as silently as stalking cats. But verse twelve paints us a different picture. It says that it was the Lord who made this whole incident possible. It was the Lord who made a deep sleep fall on the entire army. It wasn’t the skill of David and Abishai. This was an opportunity given by the Lord.

David shows that withholding violence takes more courage than doing something violent. With one violent act, his troubles could have been over. It was much harder – it was a much greater deed – to leave Saul unharmed. I think we can all learn from that. Jesus told us to turn the other cheek. It takes a lot more courage to do that than to take matters into our hands, and protect ourselves. It takes courage not to reply with harsh words or gossip when someone hurts us. It takes courage to not repay hurt with hurt.

As we read the Old Testament especially, I think it is helpful to ask: “Where is Jesus in this text?” Remember, David is sometimes a “type of Christ.” What this means is that God used David at times to show the world what the real Messiah (Jesus) is like – to people who would never get the chance to know Jesus in their earthly life.

This passage does show us a little bit of what Jesus is like. Like David, Jesus is a mighty warrior, forever in the prime of life, full of bravery and wisdom; ultimately and absolutely victorious over his enemies.

David held back from harming Saul, who, without a doubt, deserved to be harmed by David. In the same way Jesus holds back the punishment that we all richly deserve. Jesus told us to love our enemies, to pay back evil with good. David did that very thing. Jesus forgave the people who were crucifying him, even as they did the deed.

Here’s something else that I think is very significant. David did not know at the time that the Lord was using him to show the world what Jesus was like. He didn’t realize how significant his actions were. But because he lived in trust and obedience, many people in his generation, and for a thousand years after, had some idea of what the Messiah was like.

We don’t always know when someone has a chance to see Jesus through us. We can’t always tell when the Lord is doing that. Very often the opportunity comes when we least feel like it. There was a huge temptation for David to act precisely opposite of how Jesus is. So in the same way, it may be in our toughest moments that God uses us to show Jesus to the world.

The other thing that speaks to me here is David’s strong desire to worship God with other believers, his desire to be counted among all God’s people. I think today in the Western world, we sometimes forget how important this is. Through Jesus, the Holy Spirit lives inside of us, so it’s easy to begin to think we don’t need any other Christians to help us. But David had the Holy Spirit, also, and the Spirit caused him to yearn to be in fellowship with God’s people, and to worship with them. Sometimes the way we do church in the Western world is a bit messed up, and it doesn’t really reflect God’s design for church. I have a friend who has several valid criticisms of Evangelicals in America. But my friend takes it too far. He says that he is “in church” whenever he has coffee with fellow Christians, or goes to a barbeque with them, so he doesn’t need to be part of a local church. That is not what scripture says. It is vitally important for believers to be in real community with other believers, and especially to learn the Bible together, worship and pray together, and together renew Jesus’ covenant with us through the Lord’s Supper (Acts 2:42). David understood how important it was to worship with, and be connected to, God’s people.

What is the Holy Spirit saying to you right now?

1 SAMUEL #26: ABIGAIL SAVES THE DAY

On By Pastor TomIn 1 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

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Faced with a similar situation to the time Saul was in his cave, this time David almost failed, and took things into his own hands. Thankfully, the Lord sent a gracious, wise woman to remind him of right and wrong, and of the Lord’s promises. What about you and me? How do we respond when we are angry, or when we want to control things? Just as David was an example for us last time, Abigail is the one to imitate this time: to graciously speak the truth, and entrust ourselves to the Lord with the results.

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For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

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1 SAMUEL #26. 1 SAMUEL 25:1-38

As always, I strongly encourage you to read all of the text for this time, which is 1 Samuel chapter 25:1-38. It’s a little long to include as part of the text of the message here. Depending on what version you use, some things might be a little bit unclear, so let me set the stage. After the incident when David spared Saul’s life, Saul left David alone for a while, but apparently their issues were not really resolved. He didn’t invite David back to rejoin him in peace, and David didn’t push his luck. Instead, David and his men retreated further into the wilderness at the southern edge of Israel, the wilderness of Paran. This is desolate country, and it goes almost all the way down to the northeast corner of the Red Sea. It included some of the region where the Israelites wandered for forty years with Moses. In David’s time, it might have been a bit more green than now, however, it was still at least semi-arid, and people who kept large herds of sheep had to wander far into this wilderness in pursuit of water and food for the animals. There were no permanent towns or settlements there; it was kind of a no man’s land.

There was a man named Nabal who lived at the northern edge of this wilderness. He was very wealthy, and had large flocks of sheep and goats. Apparently, he regularly sent hired shepherds out into the wilderness of Paran with his flocks. They generally spent months at a time out with the flocks in this area. It was lonely and dangerous work for the shepherds. From time to time lions, bears and other animals attacked the sheep. At times lawless bandits would swoop down out of nowhere and steal some of the animals. In the spring time, the shepherds would return north with the sheep, bringing them back to the town of Carmel, where Nabal, the owner, would have them sheared, sell the wool, and butcher some of them also, and feast on the bounty of the harvest.

While Nabal’s shepherds and flocks were out in the wilderness, they encountered David and his men. At this point, David’s band numbered about six hundred. There was no way they could hunt and gather enough food to supply so many, therefore, it is certain that David and his men relied upon the kindness and generosity of others who lived at the edge of the wilderness. In spite of their need, they did not take any of Nabal’s sheep or goats when they encountered them. They certainly could have simply taken as many of the animals as they wanted – no small band of shepherds could have prevented them. Instead, they helped guard Nabal’s flocks against bandits and wild animals. In the springtime, when the herds were brought back from the wilderness, no doubt there were more than usual, since David’s men had helped protect them from the normal losses due to wild animals and bandits.

The owner of these animals, Nabal, was now cashing in on the bounty that David had helped to secure. So David sent word to Nabal respectfully asking for help for his men. He probably felt that one good turn deserved another. He could have demanded a certain percentage. He could have held all of the flocks of sheep for ransom in the wilderness until Nabal agreed to help him. Or, he could have simply taken them all. Instead, he basically said, “I have freely given protection to your people and animals. Ask your shepherds, and they will tell you. Now, would you please give us whatever you think is appropriate.”

Nabal responded with contempt and derision. He not only refused to help, but he deliberately insulted David.

Remember the previous chapter? Saul was trying to find and kill David. Though David had never done him wrong, and in fact, had risked his life time and again in Saul’s service, Saul was hell-bent on destroying David. (I am not swearing when I say “hell-bent,” I mean it literally. Saul’s rejection of God left him with a soul that was twisted to the purposes of hell). Even so, when David had the chance to fight back and destroy Saul, he did not do it. Instead, he said, “Let the Lord judge between me and you. Let the Lord bring about vengeance, if that is what he wants to do, but my hand will never be against you.” He rested in the Lord’s purposes, and refused to take matters into his own hands.

Well, here we are in a similar situation. Another powerful man had treated David unfairly. David had the ability to do something about it. But this time, David lost his cool. Rather than trusting the Lord to judge Nabal, he got into a towering rage, and started north with four-hundred of his men to destroy Nabal and his little empire.

And then comes the real heroine of the story, Abigail. She was Nabal’s wife. Some of Nabal’s men came to her, and explained what had happened. She made some immediate emergency decisions, and went out to meet David with plenty of food and supplies for his men.

Some of you have heard me preach through New Testament passages that teach us about biblical roles for women and for men. I think of Abigail as an amazing example of a woman who was used by God as a woman – not as a man. This is how it might look sometimes as we engage in the gender dance the Lord has designed for us. Abigail was wiser than everyone around her at this point in time. For a while, she was the only one who was truly committed to doing what was righteous, and she had to deal with two men in leadership who both wanted to do wrong (that is David, and Nabal). But she approached the situation with an amazing womanly grace and uniquely feminine strength.

She offered David gifts for himself and his men, which was the right thing to do. She also apologized for her husband. There is a play on words here. His name, Nabal, would have been pronounced “nu-bawl.” A Hebrew word for foolish or worthless is pronounced “nu-bawl-uh.” It’s a little like saying “Stu is acting just like his name: stupid.” (Deepest apologies to anyone named Stu who might be reading this).

Throughout the narrative it is clear that Abigail placed herself in David’s hands, and under his authority. However, while she was clearly submissive, she was not subservient. She did not hold back from exhorting David to do what was right. She reminded him of God’s promises to him. In particular, she gently reminded him that up until this point, he had fought only the Lord’s battles, and this battle he was going toward at that moment was not the Lord’s fight.

28 Please forgive my offense. The LORD will certainly give you, sir, a lasting dynasty, because you are fighting the LORD’s battles. May evil never be found in you as long as you live. 29 Even though someone pursued you and sought your life, your life is wrapped in the bundle of life which comes from the LORD your God. But he will dispose of the lives of your enemies like stones thrown from a sling. 30 When the LORD does all the good he promised and makes you ruler of Israel, 31 you shouldn’t have a troubled conscience because you spilled blood for no good reason and claimed your own victory. (1 Samuel 25:28-31, God’s Word)

You can see that she reminded him of the incident with Saul that we read about in the previous chapter. That might have been months, or even years, ago by this time. She pointed out that David was once again in the same kind of situation. She encouraged David to trust the Lord, not his own strength, and to trust the Lord’s promises to him. She pointed out gently that destroying Nabal would be something he would regret later, and it would be a shameful blemish on his record of trusting the Lord. She did it all with womanly grace and attractiveness.

There is no doubt that Abigail was in the right, while both David and her husband were wrong. Even so, there is no sense in this narrative that Abigail has somehow taken on the role of a man, or that she was imposing some sort of authority or leadership over either one of them. This is one example of what biblical submission can look like. You can see it is not subservience, or rolling over and accepting whatever men want to say or do. In her submission, her grace and wisdom were powerful and attractive. Abigail is a beautiful example of a woman who plays a significant role in God’s kingdom without violating what the Holy Spirit says elsewhere in scripture about gender roles.

And here is something important: she really got David’s attention. I suspect that David, being in the foul mood he was in, would have reacted angrily to a man who came and told him he was being stupid and making a mistake. But Abigail, with her womanly grace, completely disarmed him. He repented, and freely confessed that she was right and he was wrong.

They parted, but obviously, David never forgot the exchange. Abigail went home. She was still in a tough place, because now that she had dealt with one angry man, she had to deal with another, her husband. We have to read between the lines, but everything I see here suggests that Abigail was trusting the Lord to work out that conversation also. The next morning she told her husband, straight out, what she had done. Apparently very soon after, he had a seizure from which he never recovered. The Lord took care of it for her. I think the last time I preached about male and female roles it was from 1 Peter chapter 3. One thing I said there is that women are not being asked to trust their husbands, rather, they are asked to trust the Lord. Abigail did exactly that.

So, a couple thoughts for application. I like knowing that David needed help. Here was the man who would become the greatest king known to Israel, and not only is he in hiding, but he is barely holding on, dependent upon donations from kind friends and strangers. David wasn’t just a lucky guy who had everything fall into place for him. He spent a significant portion of time in real need, and he never would have made it without help. This is humbling, but the fact that David lived this way encourages me when I feel humbled by my own needs.

When I was preparing this sermon, I wrote the paragraph after this one, and then took a break. During the break I found out that the person who repaired my wife’s computer not only failed to fix it, but also told us that her hard drive was dead (it was working just fine when we turned it in). In addition, without mentioning it, he removed her original hard drive, which was 256GB, and replaced it with one that was half the size. For the privilege of secretly taking our hard drive in exchange for a smaller one, and not fixing the computer, they charged us almost $200. Did they think we wouldn’t notice that it was a different hard drive? Were they treating us like idiots? I was caught up in thinking about all the things I would like to say to them, and the review I would write, and maybe a phone call to the appropriate authorities. In that frame of mind, I returned to work on this sermon, and read the following paragraph, which I had written just before the break:

I think the more important message, the main one, is about trusting the Lord, and not taking matters into our own hands. David made a great choice with regard to that in the incident with Saul. But this time, David let the situation get to him. Abigail had to remind him to leave it with the Lord, or he surely would have done something that he later regretted.

Sometimes, it’s hard to be a preacher. Seriously, this sort of situation really gets under my skin, and in the past I have sometimes said things (or said them in a particular tone) that would make me embarrassed to later tell the person I am in conflict with that I am a Christian and a pastor. I have never sworn at anyone, but I have certainly been angry, and said things that were unkind and unchristian.

I let things sit for a day or two, and then all the way to the shop I prayed that I would not be a poor representative of Jesus to the repair guy. The situation is still ongoing as I write this, but I can report that I didn’t say or do anything I regret, and even after our encounter, I wouldn’t be ashamed to tell the guy that I am a pastor.

As it turns out the message from this chapter of scripture is one that is repeated in many places throughout the Bible:

35 Vengeance and retribution belong to me [says the Lord]. (Deuteronomy 32:35, ESV)
22 Do not say, “I will repay evil”;
wait for the LORD, and he will deliver you. (Proverbs 20:22, ESV)
29 Do not say, “I’ll do to them as they have done to me;
I’ll pay them back for what they did.” (Proverbs 24:29, ESV)
17 Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” (Romans 12:17-19, ESV)
19 Remember this, my dear friends! Everyone must be quick to listen, but slow to speak and slow to become angry. 20 Human anger does not achieve God’s righteous purpose. (James 1:19-20, GNT)

Maybe you don’t tend to lose your cool, like I do. Many people who remain calm still struggle with the impulse to control everything. You might feel uncomfortable waiting for God to do his thing, maybe you wonder if he is ever even going to act, and so you take matters into your own hands, in order to make sure that it does get done, and gets done the way you want it to be. I think this passage is for you folks, as well. Part of David’s problem was uncontrolled anger. But the text clearly shows that part of the danger for him was the temptation to take matters into his own hands. I have observed that many people struggle with that same temptation.

Of course, there is a balance. We aren’t supposed to sit on our hands and never do anything. At times, following Jesus means we ought to do something in various situations. But even when we act, we need to do it with a sense that Jesus is acting through us. If you struggle to tell the difference between controlling things for yourself, or acting in response to faith in Jesus, ask yourself this question: Are you OK if things turn out differently than you intended them to? If you aren’t, you might be trying to control things. On the other hand, if you are OK no matter how things turn out, then you are probably acting from a place of faith.

One of the encouraging things here is that David blew it here, but someone else came along to graciously steer him away from doing the wrong thing. The Lord knows we are not perfect, and he has never expected his people to follow him without help. He gives us the help of the Holy Spirit inside us, and also, as demonstrated in this text, he gives the help of other people who are also trying to follow him.

Listen to what he has to say to you today.

1 SAMUEL #25: HISTORY’S MOST EXCITING POTTY BREAK

On By Pastor TomIn 1 Samuel, Bible, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

David once again shows us what genuine trust in the Lord looks like. He apparently had an amazing opportunity to end his troubles and enter his destiny as God’s chosen king. However, David refused to take it, because it involved harming the man who was trying to kill him. It was more important to him to be right with the Lord than to achieve his ambitions. He trusted that the Lord would bring it about in His own time, and he, David, would not have to compromise to receive what God had promised.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download 1 Samuel Part 25

1 SAMUEL #25. CHAPTER 24:1-22

This is one of my favorite stories in the entire history of David. I think what David does, and what he refrains from doing in 1 Samuel 24, shows more courage, faith and heart for God than any of his amazing feats in battle. This is David at his best.

I want to briefly summarize the end of chapter 23, since we did not cover it in detail anywhere else. After David left the town of Keilah, he took his men and went into the wilderness on the other side of the Judean mountains. It may have been more green there 3,000 years ago, but these days, it is mostly desert. It was farther away from Saul, and in terrain that was significantly more rugged. Even so, Saul pursued David there several times, hoping to capture or kill him. During this time, Jonathan came secretly to David, and “encouraged him in his faith in God.”

I think I mistakenly said in an earlier sermon that the last time David and Jonathan ever saw each other alive was recorded in chapter 20. I was wrong, obviously. However this, here, in chapter 24, was indeed the last time the Bible records them being together. I want to focus for a minute on this last meeting of the two friends:

15 David was in the Wilderness of Ziph in Horesh when he saw that Saul had come out to take his life. 16 Then Saul’s son Jonathan came to David in Horesh and encouraged him in his faith in God, 17 saying, “Don’t be afraid, for my father Saul will never lay a hand on you. You yourself will be king over Israel, and I’ll be your second-in-command. Even my father Saul knows it is true.” 18 Then the two of them made a covenant in the LORD’S presence. Afterward, David remained in Horesh, while Jonathan went home. (1 Samuel 23:15-18, HCSB)

Remember, Jonathan, like David, had a heart for God. Like David, he was filled with faith, and confident that God would fulfill his plan. In fact, Jonathan was entirely at peace with the idea that David, not he, himself, should be the next king. What a contrast between Saul and his son! Saul thought David might be God’s next chosen king, and his reaction was to be filled with hate and fear, and to try and kill David. Jonathan thought the same thing, but his reaction was to encourage David. Jonathan’s faith is even more amazing when you think about the fact that at this time, David was running for his life. It sure didn’t look like David was ever going to be king. Even so, Jonathan had confidence that the Lord would take care of David, and that he would make sure his plan indeed happened. Jonathan himself encouraged David with this attitude.

I love that one line: Jonathan encouraged David in his faith in God. Even David, man of God, sometimes needed encouragement to continue to trust the Lord. If that was true of David, how much more so of us.

The people of the region betrayed David, as the citizens of Keilah had done. When you read the Psalms that David wrote, you will often find references to treacherous people, liars and friends who betray. This is because this sort of thing happened to David astonishingly often. In spite of his integrity and the help he brought to others, in spite of his faithfulness to God and respect for Saul as king, people were quick to believe the worst of him, and spread lies about him, and betray him to Saul.

I don’t know about you, but this encourages me. I think my natural expectation is that if I surrender my life to Jesus and have integrity in letting him live through me, people will see it, and like it, and praise God for it. I expect a positive response to God’s life shining through me. I expect good results, and favor with people. But Jesus said we ought to expect the opposite:

18 “If the world hates you, understand that it hated Me before it hated you. 19 If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. However, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you. 20 Remember the word I spoke to you: ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will also keep yours. 21 But they will do all these things to you on account of My name, because they don’t know the One who sent Me. (John 15:18-21, HCSB)

He explains that there is blessing for us in this situation:

10 Those who are persecuted for righteousness are blessed, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. 11 “You are blessed when they insult and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of Me. 12 Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt 5:10-12, HCSB)

Peter, in his first letter, also talks about this:

19 For it brings favor if, mindful of God’s will, someone endures grief from suffering unjustly. 20 For what credit is there if you sin and are punished, and you endure it? But when you do what is good and suffer, if you endure it, this brings favor with God. (1Pet 2:19-20, HCSB)
13 And who will harm you if you are deeply committed to what is good? 14 But even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear or be disturbed, (1Pet 3:13-14, HCSB)

Seeing the life of David, and hearing what the New Testament says, gives me hope. Being a person with a heart for God is not necessarily a way to get a whole bunch of people to like you. It isn’t a road to sure success. It is often the opposite. But I cling to these promises that there is great blessing for us in those sorts of trials, sooner or later. At this point for David, he experienced the persecution, but not the blessing.

At one point, David was almost caught. He and his men were in a valley or canyon, and Saul and his men were coming down another valley on the opposite side of the mountain. They were gaining on David. But before they could close, messengers found Saul, reporting that the Philistines were attacking elsewhere in Israel. Saul had to break off the pursuit. Once again, I want to point out that David did not know what his future held. He didn’t know for sure what God was doing, and he might very well have been caught. In that particular incident, it must have seemed like it was merely lucky timing that saved him.

And then we come to the incident described in chapter 24. Saul was back to his new hobby of trying to find David and kill him. He and his men were traipsing around the rugged desert and mountain terrain where, according to rumour, David was hiding. They weren’t having any luck. David appeared to be miles away. One day, Saul had to relieve himself, and he went into a cave alone for privacy. It just happened to be the cave where David and some of his men were holed up.

I want to make sure we understand the scenario. David was anointed by Samuel to be God’s chosen instrument. David and his brothers (who were there at the anointing, and with him in his trials) probably assumed that the anointing also meant that he was supposed to be Israel’s next king. Jonathan certainly thought so, and so did Saul, and probably, along with his brothers, the rest of David’s men. Israel’s present king – Saul – who was no longer God’s instrument, has been trying for a long time to kill David. Now Saul was alone, unarmed and unaware, standing right in front of David, sun-blind in the dark cave, back-turned with his pants down. Saul could not have been more helpless.

David could not have possibly have had a better opportunity to kill Saul without hurting anyone else.

David’s men believed that this was a gift from God. Surely Now was the time for David to kill Saul, and become king himself. I suspect that nine people out of ten would agree with David’s men. Killing Saul at that moment would have been easily justifiable self-defense – after all, Saul was there for the express purpose of killing David. Saul was acting contrary to God’s stated will and purposes – he was trying to kill God’s chosen instrument. So killing Saul would be not only self-defense, but also protection of God’s work in the world. I don’t believe there was a person living at the time who would have blamed David.

Hopefully, you have read the scripture. You know what happens: David creeps forward, knife held low and ready. He raises his arm to strike…and then lowers it, and quietly cuts off the corner of Saul’s robe. He creeps back to his men, and a furious but quiet argument ensues. Now David’s men, seeing that he will not kill Saul, are eager to do the deed themselves. Once again, who could have blamed David if he had let one of his men do it? Not only would he have the justifications listed already, but he could always claim that it wasn’t actually him who killed Saul, and he really didn’t want it to happen. But David argues vehemently, and commands his men not to touch Saul. Finally, Saul leaves the cave and the opportunity is lost.

I picture that the cave was up on the slope of a hill or something. After Saul has gone down a little ways, David emerges, and calls to Saul. He bows low to the ground in respect. Then he shows Saul the corner of his robe and says:

11 See, my father! Look at the corner of your robe in my hand, for I cut it off, but I didn’t kill you. Look and recognize that there is no evil or rebellion in me. I haven’t sinned against you even though you are hunting me down to take my life. 12 “May the LORD judge between you and me, and may the LORD take vengeance on you for me, but my hand will never be against you. 13 As the old proverb says, ‘Wickedness comes from wicked people.’ My hand will never be against you. (1Sam 24:11-13, HCSB)

All this wisdom from a man not yet thirty years old. But of course, it wasn’t really David’s wisdom – it was the Spirit of God at work within David. I think the key is verse 12: “May the Lord judge between you and me, and may the Lord take vengeance on you for me, but my hand will never be against you.” David literally refused to take matters into his own hands. Remember when Saul was about to lose the entire southern portion of Israel? His army was deserting him, Samuel wasn’t showing up, and so Saulheld a worship service merely for the purpose of getting people to stick around. Saul took matters into his own hands. But David would not do that. His trust was not in what he could do, but in what the Lord said the Lord would do.

We tend to look at circumstances as if they “prove” what God wants us to do. I think this is a very dangerous tendency. I knew a man who thought God was calling him to have an affair, because he felt that circumstances had so clearly put him and the other woman together. He thought it must be God. I am not making this up. It might be better to wonder if circumstances are being used by the devil to tempt us. Now, I’m not saying that circumstances never align with God’s will, but it should not be our default position to think that.

However, there is a natural question. When God sends your enemy into your cave with his pants down, unable to see in the dark, facing away from you, how do you know that it isn’t God’s will for you to kill him? I mean, we’ve already offered many reasons why no one would condemn David for doing it. So how did David know he shouldn’t do it?

I think there are two answers. The first is one that I never get tired of talking about: we need to live in a day-by-day, moment-by-moment relationship with the Lord. The ten commandments told David not to murder, but it would have been easy to justify it as self-defense, or war, not murder. David, like us, had to rely on a connection of faith with the Lord. Through that faith, the Lord communicated to him that it would be wrong. In the first place, let’s get real: if stabbing an unarmed, unaware person in the back isn’t murder, what is? David knew that the word of God was against murder.

We might say also, that David knew in his heart that to kill Saul was wrong. However the reason he knew it in his heart is because he knew the word of the Lord (in this case, “do not murder”), and he knew the Lord himself. It isn’t some mystery. If we want to know the will of the Lord, we too need to know His Word (the Bible) and spend time with him in prayer, worship and fellowship with other believers. Without that, what we “know in our hearts” might be very, very wrong.

I also think that for David, the Lord guided him in this situation through other “ordinary” factors. David, at least for a while, viewed Saul like a second father. Though Saul seemed to hate David, David did not hate in return. He still respected him, and had affection for him, and he was sad that they couldn’t have the relationship they used to have. In addition, I think David probably thought something like this: “How could I ever look my best friend Jonathan in the eye again, if I kill his father?” These might seem like very ordinary, “unspiritual” factors to go into such an important decision, but I think that the Lord uses exactly such things to guide us at times. He made each one of us. He knows the way each of us tends to make decisions, and honestly, I think we are too quick to put things into the category of “spiritual” and “unspiritual.” In my own opinion, everything is spiritual, because all of life belongs to the Lord.

Another thing is this: I think the Lord allowed David to see that to kill Saul at this point would be taking matters into his own hands, rather than trusting. I believe that there are times when God calls us to act speedily and courageously without hesitation. But there are also times when the Lord calls us to let opportunities pass by, and trust Him to bring about his purposes in his own way. Personally, I think the second way is harder, and in our culture we almost never think that way. We typically assume that if we see a means to meet our goals, it is God giving us that chance, and we should take it. Sometimes, that may indeed be true. But sometimes the Lord calls us to wait and trust so we can receive it from him, not get it by our own effort. Especially in our world today, I think we need to consider waiting on God as a first option, and only act if we are sure God wants us to. I say this because our culture will never encourage us to do that. We are taught by everything around us to act rather than wait.

Consider this: if David had killed Saul at this point, he might always afterwards wonder if God really wanted him to be king, or, if he had simply made himself king. And there was something that was more important to David than reaching his goal of becoming king. It was more important to him to be right with the Lord than to achieve his ambitions. So he said, “Yes, I’d like the Lord to judge you Saul, for what you’ve done. But my priority is not to judge you, nor to make my goals happen. My priority is to be right with the Lord.”

I want to point out that David did not meekly accept the way Saul was abusing him. He confronted Saul about how unjust he was being. He had proved his loyalty, and proved Saul’s own suspicions to be false, and he pointed those things out to Saul. He confronted Saul with the truth, but he left judgement to the Lord. So, when we are treated badly, it is not necessarily wrong to  speak out against it. It’s not necessarily wrong to get out of a bad situation if we can. But like David, we can leave judgment to God.

So, today, what’s your priority? Think of something that you really, truly want. Now imagine that you have the power to make it happen, right now. It would be easy. Would you do it, even if you knew in your heart that God didn’t want you to?

Now, I don’t want the message to be that we are just not as righteous as David. That’s not actually true. David wasn’t any better than us. He just learned to trust God, and he made that trust the primary and most important part of his life. But he wasn’t perfect. In fact, we’ll see in the next chapter that David forgot every thing he had demonstrated here, and had to be reminded of it. So, the message is: Trust God. I’ll say it again: Trust God. The thing that you want so much, the thing that you are convinced is even God’s will for you – God will take care of that. David eventually did become king. It didn’t happen that day. In fact it was still years away. But God did take care of it. He worked it out the best way possible.

I want to add something else. Maybe you’ve tried to trust God, and you haven’t been able to do it like David did. Understand this: David trusted God by the power of the Holy Spirit. If we want to trust God, it is more about surrender to the work of the Holy Spirit in us than about us trying hard. It’s about giving permission to the Lord to lead you. Once you give that permission, and you surrender your choice to God’s best will, search the scriptures, and if you have no definitive answer from that, do what seems best, trusting that the Lord is leading you.

Also, we need to remember that when we fail, we have the Anointed One, Jesus, who trusted God perfectly, on our behalf. He did what we could not do, so that when we fail (not if!), we can trust that he has made it right between us and God. To do better next time, the main thing we need is more trust.

So trust him.

1 SAMUEL #24: THE LORD’S HEART TO SAVE

On By Pastor TomIn 1 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment
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David demonstrates the best attitude for us: to recognize that we are here to do as the Lord pleases. God is not our servant, but rather, the other way round. At the same time, David shows us the Lord’s heart to rescue us. The Lord has not forgotten you, and was willing to go to extreme lengths to save you. Once we know this, we can trust him as he calls us to do things that stretch us beyond our comfort zone.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.

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1 Samuel #24. The Lord’s Heart for Rescue. 1 Samuel 23:1-14

We are reading a book of the Bible that is primarily a record of history. Theologians call this kind of Biblical writing, “narrative.” In Sunday school, we all called them “bible stories.” The gospels – the bible stories about Jesus – are narrative. So is the book of Acts. So also, is much of the Old Testament. Whenever we read narrative we should keep in mind that there are three basic layers to it.

First, narrative parts of the Bible are descriptions of actual historical events. Archaeology has consistently confirmed and correlated the bible stories we read. Skeptics used to claim that it was all made up – but in trying to prove that, they instead proved how historically reliable the Bible is.

Even so, we need to realize the second layer: that this history was written with a purpose in mind. In other words, it wasn’t just recording history for the sake of history. In the case of Biblical narrative, it is history for the sake of learning about who God is, and how he deals with his people. By the way, all history is told with some kind of purpose like this, told with the purpose of advancing a particular kind of perspective. As a for instance, a few years ago, my friend, historian Dr Mark Cheathem published a book about Andrew Jackson: Andrew Jackson, Southerner. It informed readers about actual facts surrounding Andrew Jackson and his life, to be sure. But Mark also told the events of Jackson’s life from a definite perspective, and built a case that it is a valid perspective. His main thesis is that Jackson’s life was shaped by his own perception of himself as part of the Southern gentry class. (If you are interested in Mark’s book, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Jackson-Southerner-Southern-Biography/dp/0807162310)

In a similar way, the Bible tells us real history, with a certain particular perspective about God and his people. The perspective used in the Bible is that God was at work in these events, and the writers, inspired by God, document how God was interacting with humans through the incidents that are recorded. So we not only look at the historical events, but, trusting that God inspired the writers, we look at how God was at work in them.

Finally (the third layer), we recognize that God is still telling the story, and he uses the Bible to communicate with us today, to tell us how he is at work in us and around us today. The bible is there to help us know God better through Jesus Christ. So as we read, we look for how he wants to communicate with us in this very moment, and how it helps us to know Jesus better, and walk in relationship with him.

In 1 Samuel 23:1-13, David heard that the town of Keilah, near both the cave of Adullam and the forest of Hereth, was under attack by the Philistines. As soon as David heard of it, he had two immediate reactions. First, he wanted to go rescue them. Second, he chose to ask the Lord if he should do that. Remember, both a prophet and priest were with David at this point, and I am sure that together, the three of them asked God about it. As it turned out, the prophet and priest discerned that David’s first reaction was exactly what God wanted. God’s heart, and David’s heart, was to deliver his people.

However, David’s men had a different reaction:

But David’s men said to him, “Look, we’re afraid here in Judah; how much more if we go to Keilah against the Philistine forces! ” (1Sam 23:3, HCSB)

Remember David now had about six hundred men with him. The way war was waged in those days, it is possible that some of them had previously been sent to help Saul for a short time in some of his earlier battles. These citizen-soldiers usually just stayed for one battle or one short campaign, and they were not as important to battles as the professional warriors. Generally, they just hung around, and if the battle went well, they provided manpower for pursuing enemies; if the battle went badly, they would have been the first to flee. Because these men were so low in society, however, it is even possible that some of them had no experience in warfare at all. Certainly, aside from David, none of them were professional warriors – yet. Quite simply, they were afraid.

Consider the contrast between David and Saul in this kind of situation. When Saul’s men didn’t want to obey his orders, Saul sometimes tried to manipulate them through false religion, as he did by offering the sacrifice himself, before Samuel arrived, in chapter 13, or through his rash oaths in the second half of chapter 14. Or, he assumed that he didn’t need to ask for God’s guidance, as in the early part of chapter 14. Or, he caved in to whatever his men wanted, even if that conflicted with God’s desires, as in chapter 15. In chapter 22, Saul tried to goad his men into killing the priests by speaking insultingly and sarcastically.

Now, it was David’s men who are baulking at obeying him. His approach was very different from Saul. He had already asked the Lord if he should attack the Philistines, and received an affirmative response. When his men were afraid, he asked the Lord a second time. This is so good at several different levels. In the first place, it shows that David was humble. He thought he had heard correctly from God, but he was willing to entertain the possibility that he was wrong. He wasn’t too proud to admit that. Second, it showed he had compassion on his men. David wanted to fight. But he could see that his men were afraid, so the second time asking God was for their sake, not his. However, once he did hear a second time that this was what God wanted, David didn’t tolerate any more discussion. His men could either follow him, or not, but he was going to follow the Lord. He did not seem nearly as insecure as Saul. So, he led them into battle, and they won a resounding victory, saving the town of Keilah.

But all was not well. No doubt David and his men were tired of living in the forest and the cave. So they weren’t in a hurry to leave Keilah – a real town with houses and even a wall. They were glad to hang out in civilization for a while. Saul heard that they were there, and declared: “God has handed him over to me, for he has trapped himself by entering a town with barred gates.”

I want to pause and point out two things. The first is a small difference. In all David’s interactions with God in this passage, he calls him “the Lord.” Saul calls him “God.” “The Lord,” is the way most English translations express the Hebrew personal name for God (we might pronounce it: “Yahweh.”) So, in fact, it is a more casual and intimate way to talk to God. To picture it another way, say you were talking about a man named John Smith. David is calling him “John” and Saul is calling him “Mr. Smith.” I think this is a reflection of their different relationships with God. To Saul, God was a distant Supreme Being, one that might possibly be manipulated into helping him (Saul). To David, he was a close personal relation, a friend in all things.

The second thing I want to highlight is their different approach to God’s guidance. David paused and talked to the Lord multiple times on many occasions. He asked what God wanted to do in every situation. Four times in these thirteen verses, we see David seeking God’s guidance. On the other hand, Saul simply assumed that God existed to assist him to fulfill his (Saul’s) own ambitions. In these verses, he did not once seek to know what God wanted him to do.

Let me state this even more clearly. In Saul’s mind, the whole point of God’s existence is to help Saul have the kind of life he wants. God is his assistant. But in David’s mind and heart, he (David) exists to serve God and carry out his will on earth. He is God’s servant, and even calls himself that exact thing in verse ten. I think that these two attitudes compete for dominance in everyone who believes in the existence of God. Is God there to help us live our lives – or are we here to express His Life and fulfill His Purpose here on earth? In other words, is my life about me (with God as a help and support to me), or is my life about God (with me as his valued tool and helper)? I think we all know the correct answer to that question. But practically speaking, many Christians live as if God is their servant, not the other way round. It is so easy to start thinking that the main point of God is to do good things for me. The truth is, the main point of my life is to let God work through me.

The citizens of Keilah were apparently not very grateful to David for his help. There is no record of any expression of thanks. Instead, when David asked the Lord if it was safe to stay there, the Lord told him that the people of Keilah would hand David and his men over to Saul, if he stayed. Saul’s intention was to surround the city and destroy it, with David and his men inside. It does not say so overtly, but it seems likely that it was a citizen of the town who went to Saul with the information that David was there.

This is ironic. The people of Keilah rejected their rescuer, David. Instead, they sent for Saul to come and capture David. In rejecting God’s anointed one, the citizens of Keilah were inviting their own destruction. In their rejection of David, they were destroying themselves.

Thankfully for everyone, David sought God’s guidance, as he did so frequently, and he led his men back into the wilderness, saving both himself and the town of Keilah, yet once again.

Now, we have heard the history of what happened. We have noticed how God was involved back then. But what does this mean for you today? How is the Lord using this to speak to you, to help you know Jesus better and walk with him?

Remember that David is a type of Christ. God used his life to show us what the ultimate “anointed one” is like. One of the things I think the Lord shows us here is that the heart of God is to rescue us. David, anointed with God’s spirit, heard of people who were in trouble and oppressed, and his first response was, “Can I go save them? Please?”

So, too, the heart of Jesus is for our redemption. He saw the people of earth being oppressed and destroyed by sin, and he said to his Father: “Let me rescue them!” And the Father said: “Yes!” He sees you and me, and says to his Father: “Let me rescue them!” And the Father says “Yes!”

God’s heart is for redemption. I know there are many things that happen in this life which we don’t understand. Believe me, I am a living illustration of difficult things that are hard to comprehend. I don’t know why God has not delivered me from my unrelenting pain, pain that afflicts me even right now as I write this.

But we can’t doubt that God loves us and wants to save us. He came in the flesh, he gave up his body in tortuous suffering to rescue us. More than that, he suffered unimaginable torment of soul for us. So, we know, His heart is for our redemption. Whatever you face, you are not forgotten. There is One who sees you as precious and valuable. His heart is for your ultimate salvation, for your best good.

David rescued the people of Keilah. Today, three thousand years later, it makes no difference to those people because they are dead. But the redemption we get through God’s Ultimate anointed one is eternal. It is the redemption of our spirits, souls and eventually the re-making and resurrection of our bodies. Three thousand years from now, the redemption of Jesus will still make all the difference in the universe.

Sometimes, like the people of Keilah, we don’t welcome the one who delivers us. Their rejection of David is pretty poor behavior. Here, he has just saved them, but now they turn around and try to have him killed. But if they had succeeded, they would have brought about the destruction of their own town as well. When we reject Jesus, it is just as offensive and ugly. He gave his life for us. He gave up his soul to be tormented on our behalf. Some people would like the benefits of his salvation, but want nothing to do with him – they don’t want a daily relationship with him. They feel that following Jesus, that surrendering our lives to him, will make us uncomfortable in various ways. Perhaps he interferes with our lives in ways we don’t like. Just as the town of Keilah, When we reject God’s anointed redeemer, we are inviting not freedom, but destruction into our lives. Let their behavior caution us to receive what God wants to do in our lives.

Maybe you identify with David’s men. You aren’t a professional, like he is. Perhaps God, through Jesus, is inviting you into something new and scary that you aren’t sure you are ready for. When God’s anointed (Jesus) invites you into his mission, don’t shrink back. David’s rough group of beggars and rabble weren’t fighters at this point. They were afraid, too. But out of that same group came the greatest warriors in the history of Israel.

Maybe you think you don’t have the background to pray for others, or to share your faith with your neighbor, or make a stand for God. You might be right. You probably don’t have the right background. But neither did David’s men. All they really needed was enough trust to follow where God’s anointed one led them. That’s all we need. We small, no-account group of Jesus-followers might be exactly the tools God chooses to use.

Let the Lord speak to you right now.

1 SAMUEL #22: FOLLOWING AN EXILED KING

On By Pastor TomIn 1 Samuel, Bible, Bible Teaching, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, Uncategorized2 Comments
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David and his men teach us some things about Jesus and his followers. Like the followers of David, we come to Jesus desperate and poor. Like David’s men, following Jesus means we are “all in,” with no backup plan. We are called to wholehearted commitment to Jesus. When we answer that call, even our ordinary lives are significant in the spiritual realm.

To listen to the sermon, click the play button:

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1 SAMUEL #22. 1 SAMUEL 22:1-12

1 David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam. And when his brothers and all his father's house heard it, they went down there to him. 2 And everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul, gathered to him. And he became commander over them. And there were with him about four hundred men. 1 Samuel 22:1-2

In the previous message we saw how David took the time to stop at the tabernacle to worship the Lord. This almost certainly cost him the chance to go home to Bethlehem for a final time before his exile. He did this because he wanted to be in the presence of the Lord once more. He wanted to hear what God had to say to him in this difficult circumstance. Those things were more important to him than home, family or even the certain help he would have received in Bethlehem. After stopping at the tabernacle, he went to Philistine territory, but found life among his enemies to be very insecure. Realizing he’d made a mistake, he fled from there, and ended up hiding and living in a cave near a place called Adullam. In fact we now know that there is a whole network of caves in that area.

Pause for a moment and consider how low David has fallen. He was anointed to be God’s chosen instrument, ultimately, to be the king. He served as a feared and honored warrior – he was, in fact, a national hero. He was the son in law of the king. He had lived in comfort and honor. Now he is hiding for fear of his life, in a cave. Caves are not known for their comfort. There is nothing soft to sleep on. There is no natural light. There are no bathrooms, so after a while of living there, it would smell pretty ripe. And yet, David’s heart didn’t falter. He did not appear to think he was somehow too good to live that way. Arthur W. Pink commented on this:

“The high favorites of Heaven are sometimes to be located in queer and unexpected places. Joseph in prison, the descendants of Abraham laboring in the brick-kilns of Egypt, Daniel in the lions’ den, Jonah in the great fish’s belly, Paul clinging to a spar in the sea, forcibly illustrate this principle. Then let us not murmur because we do not now live in as fine a house as do some of the ungodly; our “mansions” are in Heaven!”

Sometimes I think we Christians in the Western world are a little soft. God loves to bless his people, but his main purpose for us in this world is not that we merely feel comfortable. David was God’s chosen instrument, just as we Christians are today. And the Lord was with him in the cave, perhaps even more potently than when David finally lived in a palace. We need to take the long view, the view of eternity. What happens here and now is not the end. I like where I live right now, but it is a dump compared to my permanent home in heaven. David knew that was true for him as well.

There are two Psalms that show in the superscription that they were written by David “in the cave.” Unfortunately for David, he spent time hiding in several different caves, and at different periods in his life. So we can’t know for sure that these were written in the caves near Adullam at this particular time. But there’s a good chance that  either one or both of Psalm 57 and 142 were written at this point in his life. Remember, the Psalms are not collected in chronological order, so 142 could easily have been written before 57.

Both Psalms start with David expressing fear and anguish at his dangerous and uncertain situation. But both end with him declaring his trust in the Lord, and his praise to him. Psalm 142 seems particularly appropriate for David’s situation in 1 Samuel 22.  The last line of Psalm 142 says, “The righteous will gather around me; because you deal generously with me.”

 This is a declaration of trust. It is also an optimistic take on what actually happened shortly afterwards. David’s brothers and his father’s whole family came to live with him in the cave. He was no longer all alone – his family shared in his hardship and persecutions. In addition, more men joined him until there were about 400 altogether. The text says that these men were all either “desperate, in debt or discontented.” It doesn’t sound exactly like “the righteous.” It sounds more like a ragtag band of malcontents and ne’er-do-wells. David’s family aside, these sound not like the cream of the crop, but rather the sludge of society.

However, they all agreed upon one thing – David was now their leader. This was actually a pretty big deal. As we will learn next time, Saul the King felt that anyone who helped David was committing treason, and he sentenced them to death. So when these men gave their allegiance to David, they forfeited their lives. There was no going back. If David was not vindicated, if he didn’t end up as the true king, they were dead men.

In the Old Testament, sometimes we encounter people or events that theologians call “a type of Christ.” What they mean is, sometimes God used historical events or individuals to show the world what Jesus was like, even though Jesus had not come yet. It is a foreshadowing – a partial picture of what the real messiah will look like. These “types of Christ” serve two purposes. First they were for the people in Old Testament times, to help them understand what God is really like, and how he really saves people. Remember, Romans 3:25-26 tells us that even people in Old Testament times were saved through Jesus, as God looked ahead to what he was going to do at the cross. And so there are these shadows and parts of pictures that gave people a sense of what was to come. Second, these “types” are there to strengthen our faith. Even the Old Testament is all about Jesus, and so when we read it, we should be looking for Jesus and how it shows Him to us.

By the time Jesus walked the earth, even the Jewish Pharisees believed that many of the people and incidents in the Old Testament were pictures of the coming Messiah. In particular, the Jews felt that David’s life and character would help them to identify what the Messiah was like. David was anointed with oil and with the Holy Spirit to be God’s uniquely chosen instrument. Both the Hebrew word “Messiah” and the Greek “Christ” mean simply “anointed one.” Jesus Christ means “Jesus, Anointed One.” So some of the life of David, the anointed one, looks ahead to the ultimate Anointed One.

In this particular case, there are several significant comparisons. David was God’s chosen anointed one, and yet he was rejected by the leader of the nation. He lived with integrity and didn’t do anything wrong, yet he was forced to live as an outcast. Jesus was God in flesh, the Ultimate Anointed One, and yet he was rejected by the status quo of Israel. He too was an outcast. David accomplished miraculous things in battle against the Philistines. Jesus also performed many miraculous signs – healings, driving out demons, calming storms and more. He destroyed demonic enemy strongholds.

There is one “type of Christ” in this passage that I want to dwell on a little bit longer, and that is the followers of God’s anointed. The men that followed David were of no account. They were shiftless and in trouble, the dregs of society. And yet mostly from these ragtag 400, came some of the mightiest names in the history of Israel. There was an exclusive trio of warriors, known as “the three.” One of the three was the warrior Eleazar. Once he and David were surrounded by Philistines in an open field. They stood back to back, just the two of them, and fought against dozens, or possibly hundreds, of enemies. They prevailed and all their enemies were killed (1 Chronicles 11:12-14; 2 Samuel 23:9-10). There was a larger elite force of “thirty mighty men.” From what we can tell, they all started out among this group of no-name, no-account people who came to David long before he actually became king.

In the same way, the important members of society did not join the ragtag band of Jesus’ disciples. Instead he got tax-collectors, prostitutes and smelly, calloused fishermen. He had his “three” – Peter, James and John. He had his twelve then beyond that, a few more.

The followers of David had to be kind of desperate to go to him. They were literally giving up everything to join him. If he didn’t come through, they were lost. There was no halfway commitment. This wasn’t, “I’ll go hang with David for a while, and if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back.” No it was an irrevocable alignment with David, breaking off the loyalties of the past.

Jesus calls for that kind of allegiance from us also. He doesn’t want us to come to him, keeping our options open in case something we like better comes along.

37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:37-39, ESV)
24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 16:24-25

Peter and the twelve, like the first followers of David, went all in. Peter expressed the kind of commitment they made to him:

After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:66-69, ESV)

Peter was saying “We have nowhere else to go. We’re with you all the way – we have no backup plan.”

Just as David’s followers were desperate and poor, Jesus calls to the broken and poor in spirit. Let’s face it, it is hard to really give ourselves over to Jesus unless we realize that without him, we are lost. Paul describes it like this:

26 Brothers, consider your calling: Not many are wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. 27 Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. 28 God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world — what is viewed as nothing — to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, 29 so that no one can boast in His presence. 30 But it is from Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became God-given wisdom for us — our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, 31 in order that, as it is written: The one who boasts must boast in the Lord. (1Cor 1:26-31, HCSB)

Now, let’s be honest. Sometimes it seems like it might be more exciting to be one of David’s men than to follow Jesus. I mean, as I read this, I think about David and Eleazar fighting back to back against the Philistines. It’s like a scene out of Lord of the Rings or some other action movie involving heroic hand-to-hand combat. It’s amazing. I often wonder if this real history might have been the inspiration for the legend of Robin Hood. Even if Robin Hood was real, he might have been inspired to his deeds by this very story. There are battles, betrayals, secret hiding places, defections. It is all very well to say David is a type of Christ, but most of us will go through our entire lives without these types of exciting events. Following Jesus can seem almost boring. I mean we go to work or school and come home and do stuff, go to bed and then get up and do it all again. Sometimes we’re so bored, we make excitement for ourselves, even when it’s self-destructive.

I think that is all because we fail to recognize the spiritual reality that exists with and alongside our world, hidden, but no less real. What David and his followers were involved with physically, Jesus and his followers are engaged in spiritually. David was the king who was chosen by God, but rejected by many of the people. He lived almost as an agent in enemy territory, gathering those few worthless people who had nowhere else to turn to help him. In the same way, C.S. Lewis describes our life of following Jesus like this:

Enemy occupied territory – that’s what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

–C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

You see, though the battle is more spiritual than physical, it is no less real for all that. We have a faithful, loving intrepid leader. We are undercover – living as part of society, but not living for the same purposes as the rest of the world. Sometimes perhaps we need to wake up, and open up our lives to be more engaged in this secret mission. We need to be more aware of how the Lord wants to work, to be more aware of the people he is bringing across our paths and into our lives. I think when we are in the new creation we will be amazed at how significant our ordinary lives were. We’ll see how amazing it was that we said that encouraging word, or spoke the truth into a hostile situation, or forgave others, or showed them compassion. I think in the spiritual realm, these sorts of things are actually great battles, moments that will amaze us as much as we are amazed by the exploits of David’s mighty men – or maybe even more.

Joining the Rebel King paints a target on our backs, a target his enemies would love to use. But if we trust him and submit to his leadership, he will mold us into mighty men and women of faith, significant in God’s kingdom forever.

If you have never done it, would you consider going “all in” on Jesus, right now? I mean burn your bridges, like the followers of David did. Have no backup plan if Jesus disappoints you in the short term. Give yourself fully to Jesus, and break forever from every other means of feeling good about your life. You won’t fit in very well with the world when you do this. But you gain far more than this broken world could ever offer.