David—Big Successes Bigger Failures

Christian men want a faith that is real, that works where they live out their everyday existence—in the physical world. Life teaches them everyday not to believe salesmen’s hype, leaders’ overly rosy predictions, and coworkers’ excuses. They live in the bottom-line world, trusting only what they can measure and identify as corresponding to reality. Perhaps that is why men who get to know the Bible, love it so much. The Bible tells it like it is, with shoe-leather reality. It is the unvarnished story of the very flawed. Author Alan Redpath expresses what most of us feel about the Bible’s honest portrayal of its figures, “I find it tremendously comforting that the Bible never flatters its heroes. It tells the truth about them, no matter how unpleasant it may be, so that in considering what is taking place in the shaping of their character we have available all the facts clearly that we may study them” (The Making of a Man of God). Such a hero was David who had big successes but even bigger failures. In 1 Samuel chapters 19-23, we see David pass a big test of his faith with flying colors and then fall flat on his face, doing evil, which led to enormous suffering due to his unbelief.

As we pick up the story of David, in 1 Samuel 19, God has already anointed David to be the future king of Israel and launched him into national prominence through his defeat of mighty Goliath. Saul has appointed him top general in Israel, and chapter 18 ends with the words, The commanders of the Philistines came out to battle, and as often as they came out David had more success than all the servants of Saul, so that his name was highly esteemed. But as we saw last week, David’s success fills Saul with envy and Saul decides to murder him. The story continues,

Saul sent messengers to David’s house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David’s wife, told him, “If you do not escape with your life tonight, tomorrow you will be killed.” So Michal let David down through the window, and he fled away and escaped. Michal took an image and laid it on the bed and put a pillow of goats’ hair at its head and covered it with the clothes. And when Saul sent messengers to take David, she said, “He is sick.” Then Saul sent the messengers to see David, saying, “Bring him up to me in the bed, that I may kill him.” And when the messengers came in, behold, the image was in the bed, with the pillow of goats’ hair….Now David fled and escaped, and he came to Samuel at Ramah and told him all that Saul had done to him. (I Sam 19:11-18).

One of the most distinctive characteristics of God is that he relentlessly tests the faith of those he loves. Peter explained  this reality, when he wrote to Christians who had also been displaced from their homes, You have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. God is like a football coach who makes his players run wind sprints in August, not letting up until they drop from exhaustion. He knows that on game day, they will be glad they endured such painful trials. God is relentlessly committed to what will matter most to us on the day of Christ’s return—praise, glory, and honor going to him. The Day of Christ extends into eternity, which means our eternal joy will be linked to how we have honored Christ with our lives. God loves us too much to sacrifice that eternal joy to give us the ease, and comfort we crave now! Scripture tells us that David wrote Psalm 59 during the episode of his life that we just read about.

Psalm 59—David’s Model Response to His Faith Being Tested

As David realized he was surrounded by Saul’s troops who were waiting for daylight to execute him, he took his impossible situation to God. Someone has said, “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities for our faith to grow stronger, brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.” Maybe you are facing one right now. The challenge before you is just too big; you don’t have the resources to meet it. We know that David took the fact that he was trapped by his enemies seeing no way out to God that night because Scripture tells us so. Notice the flow of thought: 1) requesting God’s help, to 2) remembering God’s character, to 3) resolving to trust God in the future.

A. David REQUESTS God’s help. (Notice these second person direct appeals.)

• Deliver me from my enemies, O my God (vs 1).
• Protect me from those who rise up against me (vs 1).
• Deliver me from those who work evil (2).
• Save me from bloodthirsty men (2).
• Awake, come to meet me, and see (4).

B. David REMEMBERS God’s character.

• You, Lord God of hosts, are God of Israel. Rouse yourself to punish all the nations; spare none of those who treacherously plot evil (5).
• There they are, bellowing with their mouths with swords in their lips—for “Who,” they think, “will hear us?” But you, O Lord, laugh at them; you hold all the nations in derision (7-8).

C. David RESOVES to trust God for the future.

• O my Strength, I will watch for you; for you, O God, are my fortress (9).
• My God in his steadfast love will meet me (10).
• God will let me look in triumph on my enemies (10).
• My enemies wander about for food and growl if they do not get their fill. But I will sing of your strength (16).
• I will sing aloud your steadfast love in the morning. For you have been to me a fortress and a refuge in the day of my distress (16).
• O my Strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress, the God who shows me steadfast love (17).

David’s Unbelief Leads to a Sin of Omission

The Bible teaches that sin is not only an act of commission, e.g. stepping across the moral line to harm another; it is also an act of omission, e.g. not caring that a poor man has no food. The next chapters of David’s life reveal a significant sin of omission. After he escaped from his home with his wife, Michal’s help, he never went back for her. We might say, “Wait a minute, David spent the next 10 years running around the countryside fleeing from Saul.” But that did not stop David from taking another woman as his wife, Ahinoam of Jezreel, during these years and then Abigail as a second wife. The binding nature of the marriage covenant has been true since God brought Eve to Adam! Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. David abandoned his responsibility to provide for her, protect her, and pursue her. We might say, “But would not David having Michal at his side put her at risk of harm from her father’s wrath? Yes. But could not the God who protected David from the paw of the lion and bear, from Goliath’s sword, and 15 years of Saul’s attempts to kill him also have protected his wife, Michal?

In fact, David’s mistreatment of his wife Michal was even worse than abandoning her. After David failed to return for Michal, Saul had given his daughter, David's wife, to Palti the son of Laish, who was of Gallim. Fifteen years later, after Saul and Jonathan’s death, David demands that Saul’s son give Michal back to him as his wife. Then David sent messengers to Ish-bosheth, Saul's son, saying, “Give me my wife Michal, for whom I paid the bridal price of a hundred foreskins of the Philistines.” And Ish-bosheth sent and took her from her husband Paltiel the son of Laish. But her husband went with her, weeping after her all the way to Bahurim (2 Sam 3:14-16). It is very likely that David wanted Michal back as his wife for political reasons, supporting his claim to be the rightful heir to Saul’s throne. Whether this was his motivation or not, David violated the sanctity of his marriage bond to Michal. There is no denying such massive failure on the part of a husband.

David’s Unbelief Leads to a Sin of Commission

Human beings have been compared to sponges. Squeeze them and the pressure causes what is inside to come out. As we come to 1 Samuel 21, David has just confirmed that Saul is so intent upon murdering him that he exploded in fury against his own son, Jonathan for siding with David. The pressure is on. We read,

Then David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech came to meet David, trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no one with you? And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has charged me with a matter and said to me, ‘Let no one know anything of the matter about which I send you, and with which I have charged you.’ I have made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place.

This is a boldfaced lie. The text continues.

Now then, what do you have on hand? Give me five loaves of bread, or whatever is here.” And the priest answered David, “I have no common bread on hand, but there is holy bread….So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the Lord, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away. Now a certain man of the servants of Saul was there that day, detained before the Lord. His name was Doeg the Edomite, the chief of Saul's herdsmen.

Common bread, which might be eaten by anyone, is distinguished from holy bread, eaten only by the priests in a holy place. So, Ahimelech was bending the rules. However, Jesus endorsed Ahimelech’s act of putting mercy before ceremonial law. David’s request for bread was not the problem; it was his brazen lie as to his purpose for traveling to Nob. As the ESV text notes point out, “Though David normally acted like an upright man, the Bible does not hesitate to record honestly his instances of wrongdoing.” David’s sin of deceit had horrific consequences.

Then the king sent to summon Ahimelech the priest, the son of Ahitub, and all his father's house, the priests who were at Nob, and all of them came to the king.  And Saul said to him, “Why have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse, in that you have given him bread and a sword and have inquired of God for him, so that he has risen against me, to lie in wait, as at this day?” Then Ahimelech answered the king, “And who among all your servants is so faithful as David, who is the king's son-in-law, and captain over your bodyguard, and honored in your house? Is today the first time that I have inquired of God for him No! Let not the king impute anything to his servant or to all the house of my father, for your servant has known nothing of all this, much or little.” And the king said, “You shall surely die, Ahimelech, you and all your father's house.” Then the king said to Doeg, “You turn and strike the priests.” And Doeg the Edomite turned and struck down the priests, and he killed on that day eighty-five persons who wore the linen ephod. And Nob, the city of the priests, he put to the sword; both man and woman, child and infant, ox, donkey and sheep. (1 Sam 22:11-19).

Hard Lessons for David and Us

Lesson # 1: Our sins harm those we love. One member of the priestly family escaped the slaughter and fled to David to explain the genocide. David responded, “I have occasioned the death of all the persons of your father’s house.” David’s lie led to the slaughter of 85 priests, every one of their wives and children, and the death of everyone in the city of Nob. As you can see from their quick obedience to King Saul, Ahimelech’s courageous rebuke of Saul’s unjust persecution of David, and his innocence from wrongdoing, Ahimelech and the priests were some of the finest of God’s covenant people. Yet David’s lies got them all killed.

The wage of sin is death. Our sins have consequences for others. We men understand that the world in which we live operates on the basis of cause and effect. We reap what we sow. Our sinful choices harm those we love most. As leaders of our homes, we need to take Paul’s advice, Abhor evil, cling to what is good (Rom 12:9). and God’s advice to arguably the most successful man in the entire OT Joshua, This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success (Josh 1:8). Leaders have influence. Bad choices harm.

Lesson # 2: Despite God’s sovereignty, in this world, the innocent suffer. Scripture does not hide the horrific murder of the entire priestly city of Nob Similarly, this podcast can’t avoid the hard question “How could God let this happen?” Here are three biblical perspectives that help us cope with this mystery.

1. We must approach this question with humility, recognizing that we may not have the mental horsepower to understand how suffering can be good. As Tim Keller argues, “If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways!”

2. Jesus’ love poured out on the cross matters. Again, Keller observes,

Christianity alone among the world’s religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment. On the cross, he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours. Why did he do it? The Bible says that Jesus came on a rescue mission for creation. He had to pay for our sins so that someday he can end evil and suffering without ending us… If we again ask the question, “Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?” and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us.

3. The goodness of suffering can only be seen from eternity. The biblical answer to suffering is resurrection—the renewal and restoration of everything broken by sin. In Matthew 19:28, Jesus spoke of his return to earth as the palingenesis, a Greek word that means “the renewal of all things.” Jesus insisted that his return will be with such power that the entire universe will be purged of all decay and brokenness. As Sam suspected in The Lord of the Rings, once he saw Gandolf alive again, everything sad is going to come untrue. C. S. Lewis writes, “They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory (The Great Divorce). This is the ultimate defeat of evil and suffering. It will not only be ended, but so radically vanquished that the evil that has occurred will be reversed and bring about greater good. The suffering of a single woman who always wanted to be married will make her marriage to Jesus in eternity richer than it ever would have been if she had married and I believe the infants and children whose lives were cut short by Saul’s genocide at Nob will enjoy an even richer quality of adult life than they would have experienced had they not been slaughtered as infants.  

Lesson # 3: Only grace can help us forgive ourselves when our failures have harmed others. I cannot fathom what it would be like to live each day knowing I had aborted my baby, killed another person through drunk driving, or caused another’s death through making a mistake at work. I do know what it is like, however, even though striving hard to be a faithful father to the five precious children entrusted to me, to have fatherhood regrets, as most men do. I know the truth that if God’s will for our kids depended upon us always getting it right as fathers, we would all be in deep weeds. Nevertheless, we are men. We know the laws of cause and effect. We can’t easily discard the thought, “If only I had done such and such, that negative outcome would not have taken place.” David, the young, passionate, heart-driven writer of the Psalms admitted to Ahimelech’s son that he was responsible for the death of his entire family and city. That fact must have crushed David. How could he forgive himself for what he had done?

We don’t know. But we do know that when David later committed adultery and murder, which cost his own child’s life, David went to the only one whose mercy was powerful enough to undo his guilty conscience. On that occasion his cry was, Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me…. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow (Psalm 51).

Hyssop was the branch dipped in the blood of the lamb of sacrifice. The blood of the High Priest’s sacrifice—ultimately the blood of Jesus—is the only force on earth capable of granting us forgiveness when our sins have deeply harmed others. By the authority of The Holy One of Israel, if you are in Christ, YOUR CONSCIENCE IS WHITE AS SNOW—even if your sin caused another’s death. Your sin also caused Jesus’ death and God has forgiven that.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. How is David typical of most Christian men?
2. Consider the three steps David took in Psalm 59. Why might these steps enable us all to pass the test of our faith when we face impossible situations?
3. David learned some hard lessons through his dishonesty which cost the lives of the priestly families at Nob. Which of these most stands out to you?
4. Has your sin hurt another so badly that you have trouble believing that Jesus’ blood can really wash it away. If so, ask Jesus to help you. Remember, every person sitting beside you in church is a murderer because it was our sin that sent Jesus to the cross