We began this series on familiar ground, with a resumé of David’s turbulent years before he ran for cover in Philistia: years during which he impressed us as much by his musical ability as by his physical prowess. Specific gifts are a blessing if we have them, but nothing of lasting value can ever be accomplished for the Kingdom of God without courage. As Samuel Johnson declared, it is ‘the greatest of all the virtues, simply because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.’
According to many commentators, David spent seven long years on the run from King Saul, daily facing relentless threats and danger. Beyond the highly visible threat that Saul posed him, we can be sure that the powers of darkness would have been pressing in hard; after all, in any given region, satan only has so many people who represent a serious threat to his kingdom.
Just as Israel itself was and always has been the focus of their attention because it is the land the Lord had set his choice on; David likewise represented the biggest threat of all to the powers that be in a fallen world. No surprise therefore that they would make it their primary objective to do away with this man whom God had so clearly chosen. The wind really does blow more strongly at altitude, subjecting those who are in key positions to levels of challenge the rest of us know little or nothing of. No wonder the Scriptures encourage us to remember our leaders, and to pray for them to be protected both from the malice of satan (who so readily stirs up critics and opponents against God’s movers, shakers, and influencers for God) and from their own internal weaknesses.
David went through many lows in his life, to which his own writings most helpfully bear witness.
Before David could declare again with confidence and boldness, ‘The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in Him, and He helps me,’ (Ps. 28:7) the time would come when out of sheer exhaustion and dismay that there was less than no sign of the promise that God had given him that he would one day be king over the nation ever being fulfilled that he ran away altogether. Praise God that He takes even our detours into account, and knows to start in plenty of time with us in order to fulfil His purposes.
As the strain of this nomadic lifestyle took its toll on him, he cried out from a place of physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion, ‘One of these days I will be swept away by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than to escape to the land of the Philistines. Then Saul will stop searching for me all over Israel, and I will slip out of his hand.’ (1 Sam. 27:1). How perfectly that verse summed up his mindset at that time. In a sense, it is remarkable that that he had not reached such a place before. Now, as the tentacles of what we today would call burnout wrapped themselves more tightly around his heart, he – and we alike – come face to face with one of the devil’s most potent ‘pokers’: an all-pervading and deflating sense of tedium that engulfs every part of our lives.
Even when we feel as though nothing whatsoever is happening spiritually, the Waymaker never stops working.
‘Longings fulfilled are a tree of life’, as the Scriptures so beautifully put it – but ‘hope deferred makes the heart sick.’ (Pr. 13:12)
Pushing thirty by now, and fed up with the constant fear that comes from being hunted for one’s life and eking out a precarious existence in the rugged wilderness, any prospect of the promise that Samuel had so tantalisingly raised in his heart all those years ago of him ever becoming king himself must have seemed as remote as the stars. How easy it would have been to believe that he had fallen for a wistful human chimera that Samuel had dreamed up in his old age.
Many years into his reign, David would experience a partial rerun of this devastating experience when his son, his own son, launched a full-blown mutiny against him, driving him from his throne and palace into another wilderness, as I have shared at length in this series ‘Journeying with David.’ How utterly crucial at such times to dig deep and to draw on all the strength and courage that the wonderful Hebrew word chazaq, (to be, or to grow, strong and courageous) contains within it. Especially when it entails persevering at times when there seems to be no benefit to be gained by seeking the Lord because key circumstances around us never seem to change, and life and all its joys seem to be passing us by with no end or resolution in sight.
The prophet Gad had instructed David to stay in Judah, (1 Sam. 22:5) but now, in his hour of deepest despondency, and seemingly without consulting the Lord as to whether this was the right thing to do, David took his rag tag and bob tail army and ran for cover to the land of his traditional enemy: the Philistines.
In our bid to look deeper to seek to understand the reasons why David’s faith and trust collapsed so suddenly, let’s join David on this perplexing section of his journey, and see what the Lord may have to say to our hearts. Let’s buckle our seatbelts for the white-knuckle ride of what happens next – for what David experienced at that time is something that countless godly souls experience in miniature.
How tempting it must have felt just to hop across the border and to offer himself and his men as mercenaries at the service of King Achish. How easy for us to do something equivalent. Many of us deceive ourselves by thinking that we are strong in the faith when in reality we may simply be untested; the truth is that under sufficient pressure it can happen to any one of us that we turn and look for worldly solutions, rather than ‘looking to the Lord and His strength’ in the way that David would one day so movingly exhort the nation to do. (See 1 Chronicles 16)
Such ‘Gethsemane experiences’ do not require the targeted hostility of determined opponents; an all-pervading and deflating weariness that engulfs every part of our life can serve just as effectively. For whilst we tend to rally our defences in the face of specific challenges, ongoing tedium can cause us to settle for something much less than God had in mind for us.
The time had not come for David to return to the palace in triumph; rather his years on the run climaxed by what sounds like a headlong flight from one wilderness to another. But though David’s faith had taken a major dip, God had not removed His hand from him. As Paul said, ‘when we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot disown Himself’ (2 Tim. 2:13) – and He will not give up on us either. As surely as the Lord sent an angel to strengthen Elijah for the journey he had to make, and another to strengthen Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, David would ultimately reach the point where he activated his faith and ‘strengthened himself in the Lord’, and so came safely through what may well have been the least spiritually successful period of his life – a time during which we read of no exploits of faith, and no words from the Lord reaching him, nor even of him composing any of his wonderful psalms. For the simple reason, one supposes, that he was not fully in the will of the Lord, and therefore had to endure an inner landscape that was as bleak as the surrounding wilderness.
How do we interpret what we see?
Everything depends on how we process what we see and understand. Caleb and Joshua saw the same things as the other scouts who had been sent out to survey the land, but whilst the others saw only giants, and were terrified, they are alone took God at His word, and did their best to encourage others that what God was asking of them would prove possible. They continued in this faith even when the rabble were so angry that they were ready to stone their leaders – a deadly peril that we will see even David experiencing shortly in Philistia. (Num. 14:10) May the Lord grant us more of the Caleb and Joshua spirit, which presses on to overcome all obstacles and delays and to ground for the Kingdom by faith rather than to give in to the temptation to flee, as David did.
Towards the end of Revelation, we come across two sets of people who are specifically excluded from the Kingdom of God. We find all the usual suspects in the first of these ‘lists’, (in Revelation 21:8 cf 22:14-15): murderers, practitioners of the black arts and so on. More surprising is the fact that first place on the list is reserved for the cowardly. At first sight it may not appear to be the shortcoming that most merits such ultimate exclusion – after all, does not even Jesus’ own half-brother Jude remind us to be kind and merciful to those whose faith is wavering? (Jude 1:22)
Ultimately, cowardice is the diametric opposite of the fear the Lord. Truly, fear of what others say and tell us to do is a deadly snare for the soul, and something that the Lord cannot honour. For with every temptation, He also provides a way for us to stand up under it, knowing that He can yet find a way forward for us. (Prov. 29:25, 1 Cor. 10:13)
Only God can fully discern the state of each person’s heart, but ultimately each one of us lives either for ourselves or for the Lord – seeking first either our own wellbeing and self-interests or those of the Kingdom of God. Where we seek and receive courage from the Lord, we are prepared to act on whatever He shows them, no matter what others think or say, and whether or not we are prepared to follow Him down those paths because we are more concerned with eternal matters than with the approval of this world. (John 5:44)
The more single-minded we are in this respect, the more prepared we will be to act on what God shows us. whether or not others are prepared to come with us on that journey. But if we are double-minded – a lukewarm condition that the Lord specifically says that He hates, (Ps. 119:113, James 1:8, 4:8) – that’s when we will find ourselves reluctant to step out in in faith and obedience, because we are paying more attention to what others are thinking and expecting of us. May we never let either fear or self-interest hold us back from being prepared to step out in faith when God calls!
It is what is going on in the unseen places of our heart that determines the outcome. After all, if we could fulfil godly visions by our own skill and effort, what need would we have for faith? And would we not end up very quickly taking all the credit and glory for ourselves? Otherwise, we are likely either to give up, as David did on this occasion, or to try and make things happen by our own resources, just as Abraham and Sarah did when they contrived to produce Ishmael instead of waiting for the promised Isaac.
May the Lord develop more of that quality of true courage that empowers us to believe God is calling us to attempt something, then He will also provide to make it possible. It is as we have the courage to take one step towards Him that He begins the process of turning the seemingly impossible into the gloriously achievable.
Before we rush to accuse David of making compromises, from our safe distance of being three thousand years removed from Saul’s flail, we do well to take Jesus’ warning to heart not to judge lest we ourselves be judged. Under the weight of constantly struggling to provide for himself and his men in a land fraught with danger, who are we to chide David for failing to strengthen himself in the Lord, and for making poor decisions?
In a sense, it is only those who have been on the receiving end of unrelenting pressure on a scale akin to that which David faced who have the right to comment at this point. Have not the huge number of Christians who have felt obliged to flee the extreme peril of ISIL in the Middle East not had to face such choices too? There is no banket one-size-fits-all answer as to whether we should stay or leave from difficult situations; only a great need to hide ourselves in the Lord and seek Him afresh as to what we should do. Savour afresh the power of this beautiful version of ‘You are my hiding place.’
The pestilence that stalks in the darkness, and the plague that destroys at midday
On so many previous occasions David had risen up with vigorous faith and loud cries for deliverance, and, like Jesus, was heard because of his fervent God-seeking. (Heb. 5:7) The episode we are exploring here is a rare lapse: an occasion when his faith and courage were found wanting, and he appears to have succumbed to that horrible feeling of ‘What’s the point?’
Which of us, too, has not known times when, perhaps repeatedly, we have agonised over our lack of decisiveness and the smallness of our impact, and left ourselves wide open to feelings of uselessness and defeat?
Although the powers of darkness are not omniscient, they clearly do have access to our track record, and know which of our particular weaknesses to push and probe at any given time. Which of us then, under the onslaught of these hammer blows, has not found ourselves wishing that we could just run away and escape these pressures, rather than remembering to pray for the Lord to ‘strengthen us according to His word?’ (Ps. 119:28). The important thing when we are feeling embattled is to recognise when we are in danger of compromising rather than rising up in faith to reverse the flow.
In all this, the fact that the powers of darkness are ever angling for us to accept a sort of subliminal pact underlines that if we will back down a bit, he will lessen the attacks on us. It is so important to remember when the pressure is on that plenty of verses in Scripture are meant to be used in this warfare, not least to enable us to hold on.
How resolute we must be! The same powers that stirred up King Saul in his paranoia to slaughter almost every priest in the land, supposing them to be supporting David against himself, are the same powers that seek to destroy the work of God right across the world to this day. They it is who set themselves so resolutely to destroy the Christian faith in communist lands, who did away with so many in General Amin’s Uganda, and who stirred up ISIL to either slay huge numbers of believers in the Middle East, or to drive them into exile.
How often God has bestowed special grace upon those destined for the sword, causing witnesses through the centuries to recount how His Holy Spirit strengthened countless martyrs by the Spirit, who went to their deaths with a song of praise on their lips and a prayer for those who killed them; miracles of grace released that have surely advanced yet more of the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Skilled jujitsu fighters use the force of an opponent’s charge against them to flip their opponents over, and we too must look to find ways to use the force of whatever it is that comes against us to pray that even more blessing will come about than had the difficulty never arisen. Centuries later, Nehemiah would show this same resolve in the face of such highly placed opponents as Sanballat and Tobiah as they sought to intimidate him into discontinuing his God-given work of rebuilding Jerusalem. They were confident that the builders would give in under the pressure and not complete the work, but Nehemiah was forthright and specific in his prayers: “Now strengthen my hands.” (Neh. 6:9; compare with 6:19).
Selah: Take a moment to identify situations that are troubling you, and pray specifically for the Lord to turn a them round.
Remember the importance of our friends
This is where our close friendships have an important role to play. David’s heart was knitted to that of Jonathan, but as Saul’s hatred toward David increased, the time finally came when there was no choice but to accept the spear thrust of separation. And that left David with no loving, concerned and wise peer friend, but rather with a group of men who are looking to him for leadership. Who will pray with him? Who will stand with him, or go to the Lord on his behalf and truly be as an Aaron to this latter-day Moses?
Bless the Lord for those people who bolster our resilience and restore our courage at those moments when we are in danger of losing it, and who remind us that God never sends us anywhere that He is not prepare to accompany us!
What might St Paul have had to say to David had they met?
Why did David turn eastwards to seek refuge among Israel’s foremost enemies, the Philistines, rather than westwards to Moab, the land of his grandmother Ruth, and where he had already sent his parents for protection? We will never know for sure, but he clearly considered them a safer bet in case Saul came across the border to pursue him. It is hard to stay put at such times and to submit to further rough tossing. It feels so much better to be actually doing something – anything rather than merely enduring, but there are times when the Lord simply needs us to go through all we must go through in order to reach a broader place where He can bring about a great deliverance. But there are times when we are called to stand, as Paul puts it in Ephesians 6:10 – when to stand may also be to win.
Had they met in the flesh, I think Paul would have told David at that vulnerable time in his life very much what he told the Ephesians – and what he would say to us when we feel as though we are hanging on by a thread:
‘Yes, this is a day of evil, but when you have done everything else, stand your ground. Do everything you can, and then stand. Stand firm. Standing in faith isn’t weak and wimpish: it’s a warring and its winning. (Eph. 6:12-13 heavily adapted).
He might then have gone on to say something like this:
‘You’re too close to the solution to realise that now, but I can see that satan is out to get you because God has determined that the Saviour of the whole world will come through one of your descendants. Even though it seems as though your enemy is trampling all over you and squeezing the life out of you, just by standing, you are doing what it takes for God to win through.’
But David had no St Paul to spur him on. Instead of pressing in to plead with the Lord to turn this situation round, and to turn his disappointments into God-appointments, so David, as we have seen, kept thinking to himself, as we saw in the verse quoted above, “Someday Saul is going to get me. The best thing I can do is escape to the Philistines. Then Saul will stop hunting for me in Israelite territory.’ (1 Sam. 27:1) And so began a strange period in which he would be doubly a fugitive, set at a distance now not only from his own people but also from his own land.
Praise God that the Lord is not taken by surprise either by the attacks that come against us, or by the unnecessary detours that we make, even those that are entirely of own making. Just so long as our deepest desire remains to serve the Lord. This is where the biggest challenge so often lies. To judge from the example of Jonah, the Lord often seems to have more problems with His prophets than He does with bringing the people of Nineveh to repentance. He did not give up on David, just because he had left the place where he belonged, and gone to a land where he most certainly didn’t.
So many of our difficulties have to do with the matter of God’s timing. The Lord is not always in a hurry to fulfil His plans and purposes: David would still become king of Israel, as Samuel had foreseen, and would once again sleep in a comfortable bed, with food aplenty and with wise advisors close at hand – but God’s time for that still lay in the future.
How important it is not to doubt in the darkness what God has said in the light: to doubt our doubts, believe our beliefs, and to keep bashing on.
The more gifted and successful we are, the greater the danger that we come to rely on our own skills, resources, techniques, and experiences. Did pride and independence not play their part here in leading David astray? “Become as little children,” Jesus urges, because, as surely as God knows the proud only from afar, He looks with kindness on those who look to Him with all their hearts. (Matt. 18:3; Ps. 138:6)
When we are sitting on hopes and promises that have yet to be fulfilled, let’s not allow times of even very prolonged waiting to deplete our strength, or dim our hope to the point where we are prepared to settle for second best. Let’s not fend for ourselves, or content ourselves with a mindset that says, ‘God helps those who help themselves!’
The arrival in Philistia
When David first arrived in Philistia, however, things seemed to work out much better for him than he had any right to expect. Saul did indeed stop pursuing him, and he found a remarkable degree of favour with King Achish, who gave him the town of Ziklag as a base. (1 Sam. 27:4,6) David may not have been seeking God actively at this time but that in no way lessened the Lord’s commitment to him.
But getting what we think we want, or insist upon, may often not turn out to be the best thing for us in the long run. Obliged, as it were, to reinvent himself and to prove his worth from scratch, David went out on raid after raid against the surrounding tribes, taking care to put every single person to death – not so much out of a lust for blood but because he wanted to avoid anyone giving the lie to the storyline that he had spun to King Achish, in which he claimed that he was constantly raiding settlements in Judah. Thus far his deception had worked, leaving Achish complacently believing that David must be making himself an utter stench to his own people. (1 Sam. 27:8-12)
How should we regard these devastating raids across the Negev? Were they the actions of a shrewd servant, of the kind that Jesus commends in Luke 16:1-8? Or was it just the fruit of David’s duplicity, yielding one broad landing strip after another to the watching powers of darkness? The question is entirely relevant to the behaviour of Netanyahu’s current policy of destroying so many in Gaza.
Unlike certain other holy books, the Bible is not squeamish in revealing the flaws and imperfections of even its finest characters, but oh, how much it has to tell of God’s grace and mercy! Even when David made some very poor choices later in his life, whose influence ripped and rippled far and wide, God continued to show him mercy, even though He could not protect him from all the consequences of the things he had done and set in motion. Even so, He knew all that He was going to do in and through David once He was safely installed on the throne. (Rev. 21:8; 2 Pet. 2:9)
What we also know, as the result of Paul’s briefing on the whole theme of spiritual warfare, is that we are up against ‘the despotisms, the powers and master spirits who are the world rulers of this present darkness, and against the spirit forces of wickedness in the heavenly supernatural sphere.’ (Eph. 6:12 AMP) It is these powers and principalities, Paul explains, which underlie all the evil in the world, and which are always on the watch to exploit any chink in people’s armour.
The world that God loves and is ultimate Lord of, is for the time being, as Jesus and the authors of the New Testament make clear, under the yoke of the prince of darkness himself. Paul uses the word kosmokrator which means ‘lord of the world,’ or ‘world ruler,’ whose spiritual underlings exert their influence across the globe through religious, philosophical, and political tyrannies – not to mention the more likeable ‘tyranny’ of consumerism. Anything will serve, so far as the enemy of our souls is concerned, so long as it keeps people from hearing of the Saviour and thereby escaping their own dark domain.
For those of us who are committed to serving Jesus, it is our ceaseless endeavour to make Him known by any way that we can, and to ‘make no provision for the flesh.’ (Rom. 13:14) In his headlong flight from Saul into Philistia, I think it would be fair to say that David undoubtedly did make provision for his flesh, for the simple reason that he was there not as a missionary called by God for a special purpose but was there simply to look out for himself. Leaving aside for the moment whether going to Philistia was within God’s perfect, or merely permissive will, the fact was that David was now in a land full of idols, where Dagon was revered as the father of gods, and lord of the land.
The turning point lay ahead
After sixteen months of living as a raider, the God who ‘rescues the godly from their trials’ (what a precious phrase that is to hold on to when the pressure is on) was about to bring this phase of his life to an end. The pivotal moment came when King Achish asked David and his men to form his personal bodyguard of his army. He and four other kings were to muster their forces in a place called Aphek, and from there to launch a massive onslaught against the army of King Saul.
David had consistently been exemplary in refusing to take vengeance on Saul, firmly resolving to leave the fate of God’s anointed king in divine hands. But what waves of shock must have seared through his soul as he faced the implications of being obliged to go to war against not only King Saul but also against his heart companion, Jonathan, and the armies of his own people. Playing for time, David gave Achish a highly ambiguous reply: “You will see for yourself what your servant can do!” (1 Sam. 28:2)
But God had a masterplan up His sleeve to save David from having to participate in this project. When Achish reached Aphek, his fellow Philistine kings threw up their hands in horror at the prospect of having the most renowned of all Hebrew warriors embedded as mercenary soldiers fighting with their army. What if their long-term nemesis should turn against them in the heat of the battle? Refusing to let David and his men join with them, they ordered Achish to send them away – thereby sparing David and his companions the gruesome reality of having to wage war against their own compatriots.
Whether seemingly ‘ordinary’ or outwardly dramatic, the Lord finds ways to fulfil His vital purposes. On previous occasions He had rescued David so spectacularly from Saul’s hands – for example on one the occasion sending an urgent message to Saul announcing that the Philistines were advancing, leaving the angry king with no choice but to abandon his pursuit of David in order to deal with this real threat to his kingdom. Henceforth that place became known as Sela-hammahlekoth: ‘The Rock of Escape.’ (1 Sam. 23;26-29)
I find it symbolically significant that Aphek, the place at which the Philistine forces had assembled, means ‘control, restraint, and discipline.’ Behind the scenes, God was overseeing the whole episode not only to rescue David from his self-imposed exile, but also to meet the needs of His people Israel, by shaping the life of the man who would be serve them as a far more caring king. All this was in God’s mind as the kings mustered for battle at Jezreel, where the Lord was about to fulfil the word He had given so many years ago through the prophet Samuel, that He would take the kingdom out of King Saul’s hands and give it to one more deserving of it. (1 Sam. 15:28-29) Truly, He is God who is always at work at both ends.
As the Israelite troops gathered at Jezreel, judgement fell upon the forces of Israel in a battle that not only saw Israel defeated, but which brought about the death not only of King Saul but also of Jonathan, along with two more of Saul’s sons, exactly as Samuel had prophesied at Endor. (1 Sam. 31:2)
Putting chazaq into action: The God who closes as well as opens doors
As surely as it is a lovely thing to praise the Lord for all the doors that He has so graciously opened for us over the years – let’s be sure, too, to celebrate how faithful He has been in closing doors that would have led to something much less than His best for our lives! These are just as important in terms of fulfilling His destiny for us.
We can never praise God enough that He would find ways to rescue and raise up David from this low point in his life, just as He has done for countless believers through the millennia. It can be really helpful and healthy for us, too, to recall from time to time and celebrate our own ‘Rocks of Escape,’ when God has intervened decisively to rescue and redirect our life.
Let at least five such occasions come to mind – and then pray for the Lord to ‘anchor’ the memory of these deliverances in our hearts, so that we can use them as a reminder that just as He has intervened so faithfully on our behalf in the past, so will He do so again in the challenges that lie ahead.
Dear Robert.
I’m very grateful indeed for your timely commentary on David’s retreat to Philistia.
After suffering, in body or mind, for long periods there is always the temptation for us to retreat from the front line of the unending spiritual battle.
In that connectionI’ve been finding it helpful in the last few weeks of illness to remind myself of the encouragement Paul and Barnabus gave to the disciples in Lystra and the neighbouring townships by assuring them that “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God”
Please be assured that your own suffering and exhaustion is bearing abundant fruit and blessing large numbers of Christians directly or indirectly