Now, we pick up the account of David and the Philistines from the opening verses of chapter 28. This is the decisive move against Israel on the part of Philistia that will result in the battle in which both Saul and Jonathan are killed. And we complete the contrast of the two men Saul and David: what each is doing in the last days of Saul’s life.

v.4 Achish thought David was a loyal friend of the Philistines. He had been blinded by David’s charm. The other commanders were more realistic and wiser. They expected that, when push came to shove, David would stand with his own people. This realism on their part, of course, was from the Lord, saving David from having to show his hand and risk his men and himself. We are never told what David would have done if he had remained impaled on the horns of this dilemma.

 

v.8 "By now a practiced deceiver, David protests at the injustice…" [Gordon, 198] So far as we can tell, he intended to maintain the pretence of his loyalty to the Philistines after this battle was over. He did not know, of course, that Saul would be killed.

 

It is no coincidence that the rejection of Saul as king of Israel in chapter 15 concentrates

on Saul’s mishandling of his expedition against the Amalekites and that now, at the end of his life so much attention is given to David’s successful attack against them. The two men are being contrasted, as we will see more clearly as the chapter proceeds. When it comes later in chapter 31, the account of Israel’s defeat at the hands of the Philistines is brief and uninformative, an anti-climax, compared with the detailed account of David’s expedition. David is being shown fit to rule Israel in just the way Saul was not. [Gordon, 198]

v.2 From Aphek, where David left the Philistine army, to Ziklag is a distance of about 60 miles. In part, at least, this attack was retaliation for the attacks that David had made on their villages in which, remember, he had brutally murdered men and women alike. But it is the first demonstration of the divine providence that the Amalekites, unlike David, take everyone captive and kill no one.

 

v.6 David, in addition to his own private grief at the loss of his family – remember, he does not yet know what has or will become of them – has to endure a death-threat from within his own company. In this moment, he recovers the faith in the Lord that had lapsed during his Ziklag period, as we mentioned two Sunday evenings past. No more relying on his own wits, he turns to the Lord for help and guidance.

 

v.10 David had divided his men this way before (25:13).

 

v.12 We are being reminded, by the way, how inhuman the Amalekites were and how cruelly they treated their slaves.

 

v.20 To anticipate, "plunder" is the leitwort or key word in this text. It appears first in v. 16, then, in 19, and now in an important statement in v. 20. We’ll come back to that momentarily. But, get the point: David recovered the plunder by his prowess as a commander, it belongs to him!

 

v.22 Remember, we noticed some time ago that all sorts of men gathered around David in his wilderness days, some men of real quality and some not.

 

v.23 Remember, when, in 1 Sam. 15, the soldiers suggested to Saul a different approach to the plunder of the Amalekites, he listened to them. Here David refuses to listen to his men and charts his own course. He is a true leader.

Now, as we noticed, the key word or leitwort in this narrative, especially in its conclusion, is the word "plunder." We find it in 30:16, then, again, in vv. 19,20,22, and twice in v. 26. What is more, it is the subject, though the word is not used, in vv. 23-25.

Now, take careful notice of the progression of thought in the narrative. On their raid, the Amalekites had taken a great deal of plunder from the land of the Philistines and from Judah. David then recovered all of that plunder, which included not only what the Amalekites had taken from him at Ziklag, but everything else the Amalekites had taken. Now, by the rights of war, all of this plunder belonged to David. His own men are quoted as saying so in v. 20: "This is David’s plunder." No doubt, as the following verses make clear, the men assumed that they would get their fair share of what David, by his prowess as a military commander, had recovered.

But his men are not disposed to share the plunder with the 200 men who were too exhausted to continue the pursuit of the Amalekites and, instead, had remained with the supplies.

But, unlike Saul, David is not a man to let his soldiers, including the riff-raff among them, do his moral thinking for him. He decisively rejects their proposal to leave the 200 out of sharing of the plunder; they will get an equal share. What is more, he not only shares the plunder with all his men, he shares the Philistine plunder with a number of the towns of Judah, particularly those that had assisted him or showed him kindness in his flight from Saul.

And why? He explains in v. 23. This plunder was the Lord’s gift to them. It would be a betrayal of the Lord’s grace and mercy to be themselves selfish toward others. And David not only orders that, in this case, his men will share and share alike, he goes further. He enacts a statute and an ordinance to the same effect. Whenever God grants Israel victory in battle – and it will always be the Lord God who gives Israel her victories – all the soldiers will share and share alike.

And here is the narrator’s picture of David that he wants us to contrast with Saul, Saul whom we have seen in the previous chapter spiritually and morally disintegrated. Remember, in 22:7 Saul had sought to tempt the army to remain loyal to him by the promise that its leaders would get rich with him and wouldn’t under David.

But, David, the ideal king, does not promise to enrich those who throw their lot in with him, and he does not act to enrich himself. He easily could have; the plunder, by right of war, belonged to him. But the righteous king does not enrich himself, he enriches his nation, the men who follow him, and he does so by dispensing the wealth he knows full well the Lord has given to him for the purpose of giving to the Lord’s people.

The contrast with Saul is now complete. The king who had no faith in God and no understanding that all that he had was from the Lord, sought to keep men loyal to himself with the promise of riches to his favorites (22:7). David is a king who will seek to keep men loyal to God by mediating God’s blessings to them. Israel’s first king is selfishly ambitious. Israel’s second king is ambitious for the kingdom of God and loyalty to God in the hearts of his people. He is a man of faith who knows that all that he has and all that he receives in battle comes down from the Father of Lights! Here is David once more, the Christ figure. The one who will forsake his own earthly and selfish interest to serve the interests of God in the hearts of God’s people.

And, like the Lord Jesus, who not only saved us from our enemies and grants to us – in part now and totally in the world to come – the plunder of his victory, he also gave us an example that we should follow in his steps. The fact that one is able to aggrandize himself, to enrich himself, to accumulate the fineries of life in this world, does not necessarily mean that he should. There are other interests to be served by Christian people in this world than the accumulation of wealth and the pleasures money can buy. This is not a philosophy of life you will learn in the Wall Street Journal or in Money magazine, but it is a way of life you definitely will learn in the Bible.

A few years ago now, I had lunch with a young man who was doing very well in his business, making a great deal of money. And in the midst of a conversation about other things, he asked me what I thought about his getting a new Mercedes Benz. He wondered what people might think about him if he suddenly showed up at church in a very expensive new car. We talked for a bit about the implications of our faith in Christ for such a question as that and I left him with the counsel that, whatever he did, he must do it, in good conscience, out of loyalty to the Lord Jesus. Clearly there are wealthy Christians and well-to-do Christians, and there is no law in the Bible against owning and using expensive things. David, indeed, became a wealthy man in due time. But the way the question was troubling this young man was the indication that his loyalty was being tested. He failed that test and is today living in open rebellion against the Lord.

We not only were saved by a man who could say of himself, "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head," who could say that even though the cattle on a thousand hills belonged to him, we have been taught by him that there must be that same thoughtlessness about worldly goods as he had. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you."

Here is David as such a man and so both prophesying in his own life of the righteous king who would come to sacrifice himself for the sake of others and showing us how to live the same kind of otherworldly, life for others that he did.

One thing more, to live that kind of life, there must be, as there was here in David’s case, actual instances of turning away from what could be yours to bless others instead in Christ’s name and for Christ’s sake. It is not enough to have a theoretical commitment to a Christlike selflessness. There will be occasions enough actually to put that selflessness into practice. We ought to be looking for such occasions and taking care to exploit them on a regular basis. When was the last time you took something the Lord had given to you, it was yours, and you gave it to someone else. When was the last time you did that, not to impress someone or to win someone’s loyalty but, instead, simply because the Lord had given it to you? It should not be difficult for any of us to think of the last time!