STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 28
1 Samuel 21:10-15
October 22, 2000
Text Comment
v.10 Why David went to Gath, a Philistine stronghold, is not certain. Gath was the hometown of the late Goliath. Carrying Goliath’s sword would have been a public demonstration that he really had deserted Saul and was willing to go over to the Philistines. Probably he intended to offer himself as a mercenary and had hopes that his former success against them in battle would lead them to consider his desertion from Israel’s army a great coup for them. The danger, of course, was that they would want revenge for the defeats he had inflicted on them. Later he will serve them as a mercenary, so clearly David’s expectations were not without solid foundation. In any case, there is no territory in which he would be safer from Saul than Philistine territory.
v.11 Some have suggested that David went to Gath incognito, hoping to remain undiscovered, but that his plan came apart when he was recognized by some of the officials of Achish’s court. I think that is doubtful and much more likely that he went to Gath precisely as David the Philistine’s former enemy.
Now this is a most interesting episode. Here we have David feigning madness, in contrast to Saul whose very real madness was God’s judgment and was a sign that God had taken the kingdom away from him. And he must have been a very good actor, because Achish, the Philistine king, was so repulsed by what he saw, as we read in vv. 14-15, that he simply wanted David away and didn’t order his execution. What a different David we have here from the hero of the battle with Goliath or the commander whose military exploits have won him a greater fame than King Saul. Here he is a demented figure from whom everyone recoils.
But what makes this episode more interesting still and more important is that we have in the Psalter two psalms that David wrote expressing his state of mind and heart during these days in Gath. Psalm 56 is his prayer when first seized by the Philistines. Psalm 34 his thanksgiving upon his deliverance. (By the way, you will see in the title to Psalm 34 that Achish is called Abimelech. Abimelech was a Philistine title for the king, like Pharaoh was for the Egyptians. For example, both Abraham and, many years later, Isaac had dealings with a king Abimelech. Almost certainly these two kings are not the same man, just as there are several Pharaohs referred to in Genesis and Exodus.)
Now, I’m going to read Psalm 56, while you set David in this particular historical circumstance.
Now, without a doubt the psalm reveals David as a man of true and deep faith at this stage in his life. A man who is trusting God for his safety, a man of prayer, a man of worship, as well as a man of deep feeling.
Now, I’m going to read Psalm 34, which records his thanksgiving to God and his exultation after his deliverance from the Philistines in Gath. Imagine him as he wrote these words for the very first time and following hard on the heels of his having prayed and written Psalm 56.
Now what is fabulously important and very interesting about this great psalm in its relation to the historical narrative in 1 Samuel 21:10-15, is the way in which David’s deliverance is accounted for so differently in both places. Listen to David in Psalm 34:
1. I sought the Lord and he answered me…
2. This poor man called, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles…
3. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them…
4. Fear the Lord…for those who fear him lack nothing…
5. The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their cry…
6. The righteous cry out and the Lord hears them…
7. A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.
Do you see? Nothing here at all about David’s magnificent performance as a madman. The Lord did it. The Lord rescued his servant. That is all. There is no reference whatsoever to David’s strategy as the means by which the deliverance took place. In the history itself, in 1 Sam. 21, there is no reference to the Lord’s deliverance, only to the effect of David’s acting the madman.
Here is the biblical tension between faith and means, between trusting God and taking action ourselves. And here is the biblical validation of both, in that the same event can be accurately accounted for as the working of God and as the result of the actions taken by man. David escape Gath because of his feigning madness and he escaped Gath because the angel of the Lord encamped around him and delivered him. Both are true and both are absolutely true.
You get this a great deal in the Bible. In Psalm 3, David sings of his deliverance by the Lord from the rebellion of his son Absolom, and does not mention at all the role that his friend Hushai the Arkite played in overturning the advice that the wise Ahithophel was giving Absolom and so played in sabotaging Absolom’s coup d’etat, a role that is featured in the historical narrative in 2 Sam. 15-16. Or take the account of Eleazar, one of David’s mighty men, in 2 Sam. 23:9-10. In action against the Philistines, when all the Israelite army was retreating, he stood his ground and struck down the Philistines “till his hand grew tired and froze to the sword.” Then we read, “The Lord brought about a great victory that day.”
We tend to pit faith against means, to imagine that somehow it is one or the other, but the Bible never does this. When Cromwell told his soldiers to trust the Lord and keep their powder dry, or when Nehemiah says that, in the face of building opposition to his project to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, “we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night,” they exactly reproduce the Bible’s mind about the relation between our prudential actions and the deliverance or the provision or the blessing of God. The Lord uses our means and the fact that he uses them does not make that deliverance or provision any less an act of his grace or any more an act of our own achievement.
There is mystery here, but no doubt whatsoever that it is what the Bible teaches us about our lives and about the way to obtain help and blessing from the Lord. We make no effort, as the Bible makes no effort, to reconcile means and faith, for you only reconcile enemies and clearly, in the Bible, faith and means are friends not enemies. So we embrace both faith and means. God gave us minds and muscles and expects us to use them. He promises to respect our integrity as thinking, planning, acting creatures, as he made us to be. But we are also needy sinners, incapable of ourselves of accomplishing anything truly good and necessary. And so we plan and act, as David did, and look to God. It is no virtue to simply trust the Lord for our new building and not be prudent in planning for it and undertaking to pay for it responsibly. And it will be no virtue and we will have no blessing from God if we plan to the nth degree, raise money with all manner of success, but do not look to the Lord for the building of his house. Both together, always and in every way.
To trust the Lord does not mean that we are to be one whit less prudent or that we are any less to bestir ourselves to action. And to bestir ourselves to action does not mean that we are any less to trust in the Lord as the one and the only one who can deliver us from our troubles. That is a key element in the biblical world view. And those who embrace that world view will do things as dramatic and do them as well as David did and then, in their prayers, ascribe all glory and credit to the Lord their God.