1 Samuel Lesson 33

David Accepts Undeserved Suffering – 21:10-12, Psalm 56

Some questions were handed in: why did the Holy Spirit okay a rebellion against Saul when David never rebelled against Saul but only ran from his persecution and never lifted his arms against Saul aggressively to kill him but only to protect himself? It is a rebellion because of the insubordination of David, actually it’s mutiny and it doesn’t matter whether David never lifted his arm against Saul aggressively to kill him, that isn’t the point. What defines his rebellion is his rebellion against the authority of Saul in the command structure of the army and so on, and it would be and always has been interpreted as a revolt, no question about that, just how he handled the revolt. The technical word to refer to something like this, in case you do some reading and come across these terms, but theoreticians have two words to describe government in this situation; there are two kinds of government, one is called a de facto government and one is called a de jure government. Saul is a de facto government. This means that you have, in fact, a government, that the government really is there, but it is not a de jure government, it is not a government that has duly invested authority. So at this point when you have a revolution the discussion is not over de facto government, it’s over de jure government, which government is de jure, not which government is de facto; which government is the authorized and legitimate government; is it the government of those against whom the revolt is made or is the de jure government the government of the insurrection. And so this is always a collision in every major revolution.

The second question is your explanation about lying left my conscience cold and I didn’t even submit the original question. Surely, since God is absolute truth He knows a lie as a lie. It would seem He may not make an issue of that lie at the moment since many other things are of greater importance but surely such a lie paves the way for easy rationalization of lies later on which the Lord will have to make a real issue. [Can’t understand words] think the explanation it is just too easy to rationalize lying in an unseemly difficult situation in life, since each person faces problems worse than anyone else’s anyway. That’s a very good point, except I think you missed one of the carefully guarded statements I made and that was that wherever the Bible seems to permit the lying, it is always in connection with a de facto government and the lie is always made against the de facto government; it is never used on an individual moral plain, it is not used in other situations. But where you have rebellion and revolt against de facto government, it appears that the Bible does condone lying; as odd as this may seem to you, this is a very difficult, and I agree with you, can be very, very easily misused. But my job is not to teach the Word of God as I wish it would be but to teach the Word of God as it is and that’s the way it is.

Now in 1 Samuel we’re still in the persecution phase of David’s life; this phase extends from chapter 21-27; chapters 21-22 deal with a certain part of this persecution phase. Remember the overall persecution phase features David’s life during the time when he is a type of Christ; who in Satan’s world is persecuted before he actually occupies his throne. So you have an analogy between David trying to occupy his throne, that is legitimate, and Jesus Christ trying to occupy His throne that is legitimate. David is an excellent type of Jesus Christ. Now in chapters 21-22 we have entitled this as a lesson David learned where David is humbled before God by his failure and human viewpoint strategy. David makes a slip here, it’s not a bad one, but he does make a slip, and it is not a major sin either, and that’s why the Holy Spirit doesn’t make too much of an issue out of it, except He does point out in the last part of chapter 22 that David had failed.

Now the principle: why is it that David has to learn this lesson in chapters 21-22? The principle is that David is going to have to receive his throne by grace; this is politics by grace. If David is to be a type of the Lord Jesus Christ then David’s lifestyle must reflect the lifestyle of Jesus Christ Himself. Therefore, David’s throne must be secured in such a way that will honor and pave the way for the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so when David does receive the throne it is because he has used the faith technique. Now the faith technique is made up of two parts; it has a resting side and it has a doing side, and you have to understand the two and why they are different. Every act of faith you do has both of these elements. Sometimes it may be 10% doing and 90% resting; other timers the ration may be different. But by doing we do not mean sanctification by works, so let’s be careful we understand the doing. The doing part of the faith technique means functioning as a responsible creature within my limitations, looking to the will of God of course. It simply means with a volition I am using my volition as a creature, that’s all we mean when we talk about the doing. This is not hustling or something, this is just functioning as a responsible finite creature. I have certain things that I have to do, God holds me responsible for those, and He expects me to do them, that’s the doing, and the doing is by faith. When I do them with my eyes on the Lord Jesus Christ, trusting the promise of the Word, then I’m doing that by faith.

The second part, resting, has to do with waiting on God to provide what lies beyond my limitations. So I have a certain amount of limitations here that box me in; the resting means that I acknowledge that I am going to depend upon Him to supply what I am not responsible to supply. David uses the faith technique; he does certain things but David, like us all, has to learn where the doing stops and the resting begins. And that is the nature of David’s lesson at this point, a very familiar lesson. David is learning it in the context of suffering. There are six categories of suffering and David is suffering under categories four, five and six; this means the suffering is undeserved in an immediate sense. Since therefore, David is suffering under categories four, five and six, it means that David has encountered something new in his life that He must understand; he must study, he must have time to meditate and pray over. And he must stabilize his life.

David did not take time to do this, and so last week we found that David committed a tactical error and he committed it because he was off balance spiritually. He used hastiness and he chose and he moved at the wrong point at the wrong time. So he received a problem, and the problem worked out beautifully under the Romans 8:28 principle because although David for a moment went on negative volition, it wasn’t a serious thing, but for a moment he did go on negative volition when he saw Doeg there and he knew he shouldn’t have opened his mouth, and he knew that he shouldn’t have asked for the sword in front of him, he knew he was a traitor, he knew he was Saul’s spy. But nevertheless David, because he was in a hurry, because he realized that he needed food and he needed armaments for his revolution, David had to rush in, instead of waiting upon the Lord, and with the result the city of Nob was annihilated by Saul’s henchmen.

Now it’s most interesting but even the annihilation, as horrible as it was, at the city of Nob, where 85 priests and their families and their wives, and their children, and their dogs and cats and everything else, were slaughtered, in spite of how horrible that was, that was all prophesied in 1 Samuel 2-3. Remember the prophesy against Eli’s house, that it would be brought down. So even that was a fulfillment of prophecy, so this is how beautifully the sovereignty of God works. Even when we’re out of fellowship we’re serving Him in the sense that we are fulfilling prophecy. Now of course, this is not an excuse, as Paul points out in Romans 6, to just go out and go on negative volition but it does show that God’s sovereignty is greater than anything you can come up with, and therefore by way of application it means you can’t lose your salvation if you are elect; if you are in Jesus Christ and God has sovereignly decreed your justification there is no way you can outdo God’s sovereignty.

Tonight we are going to go to the second part of this incident. Let me diagram the text as it stands; you’ve got 21:1-9 and then we skipped and went to 22:6-the end. I had to do that so you could get the continuity of that incident, so you could trace what happened at Nob with the mistake David made at the tabernacle. So we hooked those two pieces of the text together. Now we’re going to go back and pick up some of the text in between. We’re going to do from 21:10 for a couple of verses and these verses are going to introduce us to the other part of David’s toulies trip. The first nine verses deal with how he originally made his mistake at the tabernacle, how he grabbed the sword, grabbed the bread, and he was in such haste that he did it out of fellowship.

Beginning in 21:10 we find David fleeing; now if David’s first error at the tabernacle was one of hastiness to secure food and provision when he didn’t have to secure it quite that way, his second mistake or error was from the same basic cause; he was hasty, Now this should be very, very familiar to most of you because I’m sure every one of you has run into someone, somewhere in your life that said something like this to you: oh, if I could just change my environment things would be better. If I could just get out of this house things would be so much better; if I wasn’t married to this clod, things would be so much better. If I didn’t have him for my son so many things would be better; or if I didn’t have those clucks called parents I really would be sailing. Always some excuse, always running away from a problem. David is doing this here; David is going to run to a place called Gath, and to use a proverb he jumped from the frying pan into the fire on this one.

Here was the tabernacle, the battle lines had been established to the southwest of Jerusalem; we don’t know exactly where the battle line was but to the southwest were the Philistines and to the east were the Jews. And that’s the way it sat at this point in history. Now David, on Israelite territory, is being persecuted by Saul. So in this area he has problems and they center in Saul. So David, again, very hasty, not settling down, not relaxing, not taking time out to say just a minute, let’s get this all together from the basis of the Word, instead of doing that he keeps on rushing and now he makes a second mistake. His first mistake was to rush in the tabernacle and get the food and armaments in the light of Doeg; his second mistake is going to be a false deduction. His deduction is look, I’m under pressure in Saul’s territory so what I’m going to do to get away from my problem is I’m going to take a long vacation in Philistia. I’m just going to drop out. And David attempts to just forget it, he’s been a hero and everybody knows David in Israel; everybody sings to him and he’s a national hero at this time. And David thinks to himself, now look, ever since I became a hero, ever since those girls in the street started singing Saul has killed his thousands but David has killed his ten thousand, every time the chorus girls sang that I’ve been in trouble. And David resents that song.

Now we’re going to see how the song comes back to haunt him. But the song, David feels, contributed to his problem; if they’d never have sang that then Saul would never have been jealous and I would never have had my problem, so my problem is all those fellow Jews under Saul who are now jealous, and if that’s really my problem, guess what? I can get away from my problem by changing my environment, by changing my geographical location I can escape my problem. And as a believer we would say get out of the house, I can solve my problem; get out of this marriage, I can solve my problem; get out of this family and I can solve my problem. There’s only one problem, the problem is you not the situation, so guess what happens? You move from one area to the next, you take your problems with you, you can’t detach yourself from your own problems. And this is what happens here.

Verse 10, “And David arose, and fled that day for fear of Saul,” “that day” shows the hurriedness, David is still rushing at this point, he still hasn’t taken time to be alone with the Lord, and to get things straightened out on the basis of the Word of God. He is still rush, rush, rush. “David arose, and fled,” David has fled continually, he has fled continually from the time that he left his wife’s home. When Michal dropped him out the window, until now, David has continually been running. The last time he showed evidence of stability was when he wrote Psalm 59 which was in that house, the morning that he woke up and found the bodyguards ready to ambush him at his front door. That was the sixth attempt of his life. He ran to Samuel at Ramah, and at the seminary God graciously protected him from Saul. And then after the seminary incident he comes to Jonathan, so he’s moved from Ramah to Jonathan; he’s moved from Jonathan, out to Nob, where the priests are, and now he’s fleeing again.

So David is on the move; watch that in your life. The times when Satan can bum’s rush you into making some bad decisions are when Satan keeps putting the pressure on, putting it on, more on, and keep you moving; that’s all he wants to do, keep you from getting settled down in the Word of God. I can’t listen to tapes today because I’ve got something to do, and I can’t tomorrow because I’ve got something else to do. I can’t come Sunday night because I’ve got something to do. I’ve got this to do and that to do. Just keep it up because sooner or later you’re going to make a bad decision and you’re going to wish you’d taken time out to just get things straightened out, because other wise you’ll spend five or ten years trying to unravel the mess that you made because of stupid decisions.

Now here David is going to make a bad one and so he flees that day, continually running, running, running, and he fled from Saul’s face, now this shows you David is having problems because the last time that David pointed to his faith was in Psalm 59 and in Psalm 59 it was Saul’s face right outside his front door. Turn to Psalm 59 just to remind ourselves what David did when he was thinking. In Psalm 59 David responded beautifully to the pressure situation. He responded by going back to God’s promises. Verses 8-10, “But Thou, O LORD, shall laugh at them; You’re going to have all the heathen in derision; [9] Because of his strength will I wait upon Thee, for God is my defense, [10] The God of my mercy shall go before me, God shall let me see my desire upon my enemies,” and the word in verse 10, “God shall prevent me,” or God “shall to before me” was David’s faith that he could walk out of his home, even if he had to go out through the window, however he got out of the house, God was going to be before him, preparing the way.

Now that was the way David thought when he was in the Word; that was the way David thought when he was in fellowship and moving with the Lord. Now we come back to 1 Samuel and here’s how David acts when he’s not thinking; he’s all screwed up at this point. We’re not saying this to condemn David in any way; we’re just pointing out that the Holy Spirit has so recorded this event in David’s life, we can thank the Lord He didn’t, but He could record any of our lives, plaster us on the pages of history; wouldn’t we love that, have some minister talking about you ten centuries from now. Look at this clod, boy was he out of fellowship, now doesn’t that illustrate a stupid believer, etc. David, fortunately has many positive things, his life was a very wonderful thing but at this point David’s life does show that he lived, he had blood just like you do, it was red. And he had problems with sin in his life just like we all do.

“…and he went to Achish, the king of Gath.” Now the title says he’s “king of Gath,” but actually the title for the Philistine kings, Abimelech, Abi melech actually, Abi means my brother, melek is king, now why they call themselves this we don’t know, but it’s the Abimelech of Gath. Does the word “Gath” strike you as kind of odd and peculiar? Why of all the Philistine cities he should decide to go to Gath? Look at 17:4, of all the cities to go to to try to disappear, where does he go? Goliath’s home town, just where you’d know he’s be perfectly welcome after he crunched the town hero. That’s the town he in his carnality picks out to be his vacation land. Now David actually is trying to disappear, this is what he’s trying to do, he has that same thing I’m sure all of you have felt at one time or another, I’d just like to move away and just drop out, change my name and start all over some place. Well, David is trying to do that. And guess what the armament is that he happens to be wearing in Gath? Goliath’s sword. So obviously he’s not in too good a shape as far as chokmah is concerned at this point. To take the old boy’s sword and walk into his home town with it, would rather show the people who he is.

And so verse 11, immediately, of course, “the servants of Achish said unto him, Is not this David the king of the land? Did they not sing one to another of him in dances, saying, Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands?” Guess what David? The song came back to you. See the song was what he blamed for all his problems in Israel; if those dumb women hadn’t have sung that song I would have been all right. And so now he goes to Gath and what happens? He can hear it, Saul has killed his thousands, David his ten thousands. He can’t run away from it, he’s haunted by the same problem. But there’s something more important than the song in verse 11 and I wonder if you notice it. What did they say to the king when they reported in, before they quoted the song? They quoted, he is “the kind of the land,” and this is most interesting because it goes like this; we have melek, ha aretz, and aretz means the land, and the question is this land or is this earth. It can refer to both, that Hebrew now, and whether it refers to the land or the earth isn’t too much of an issue, except for you to notice that aretz includes at this point the Philistine territory as well as the Israelite territory.

Now why this phrase, melek aretz, so important in this verse? Because it goes back to the same principle of Rahab. Do you remember when the spies went into the land centuries before this; after all of the situation with the Exodus experience and the catastrophes that surrounded it, what did Rahab say; she said look, we know that you’ve already won the war. In other words, the historic empirical evidences had so impressed the unbelievers, it impressed unbelievers more than it impressed carnal believers. Now you watch this, this is always the story. Go back to the Rahab incident, on the left side of this chart we’ll put the unbelievers, on the right hand side we’ll put the believers, all carnal believers in that generation, because they wanted to go up to a place called Kadesh-barnea, and they failed. Now here you have unbelievers; where do they see evidences? Where do the carnal believers see evidences? Do they both see the same evidences? Yes. Then what is the difference between the way the unbeliever responds to the evidence and the way the carnal Christian responds to the evidence? The carnal Christian, because he has gone on negative volition is in mental revolt, so his mind is fighting against his conscience, and when the mind fights against the conscience, the conscience return flow, or the return circuit, starts to blind the mind. The perception of the mind actually decreases; the mind is actually blinded; it is safer never to have seen the evidences than to have seen them and have turned away from them.

An application of this would be people who come to a place where the Word of God is taught; we have people that have been taught the Word in home Bible classes, they’ve been taught the Word in various churches around the city, taught it for years and years, and look at their lives; they’re up and down, unstable, never can settle down, hop from one place to the next, they look for the latest religious gimmick to town whether it’s some Roman Catholic priest peddling tongues or something else, they’re always quick to jump on the wagon. What makes these people this way? They’ve been exposed to the Word, they’ve been exposed to the evidences, what’s going on? The same thing that’s happening back here, you’ve got carnal believers and they have actually, because they have once seen the truth and turned away, God has blinded their minds; they are forever seeking, seeking, seeking. Blindness has set in, and they are actually more unstable and more miserable than unbelievers.

Now you have the same thing here at Gath. The unbelievers in this case are men who grew up after the riot, there were some years since the time that David killed Goliath, there’s close to a decade, six or seven years have elapsed, and so the exact memories of who that Jew was that killed Goliath have gone out. Now some of the servants of Achish are older men and they evidently spot David and they know him, but what is it they say? Here is the melek ha aretz, this is the kind of the land, they don’t even give two cents attention to Saul. For them the threat to Philistia is not Saul. For them the threat is David because all the empirical evidences point to David. It’s David that is so clearly king, and that’s the thrust of the Holy Spirit as He takes us through the book of Samuel. All these chapters, don’t lose the forest for the trees, all these chapters in Samuel are to show us how the empirical evidences of David’s life impress his generation. And it condemns those in David’s generation, who, like carnal Christians today, saw the evidence and turned away and rejected, I will not bow, this can’t be God’s will and I’m not going to accept it as God’s will. God may think He’s going to have this as His will for my life but I’ve got another plan. And actually more perceptive unbelievers live in Gath than in Israel at this point, in this hour.

Now some very marvelous believers are going to join David in the beginning of his army, when we get into the first part of chapter 22. David is going to form the nucleus of his army from a very God-forsaken group but he is going to call out people who correspond to believers in the Church Age, who come to their Lord in exile. But David, while he himself is in exile, out of his land, David faces perceptive unbelievers. So that’s why they say, “is not this David the king of the land?” And they’re scared; they are actually afraid, and yet of course David is afraid because in verse 12, “And David laid up these words in his heart,” now that phrase in verse 12 tells us something; there’s a gap of time between verse 12 and verse 13, because the phrase “David laid up these words in his heart,” means that he remembered them for some time period. There’s a lapse of time between verse 12 and 13, so David remembered these things and became very afraid of Achish. There was a process of time.

Tonight we’re going to study what happened during the gap between verses 12-13 of 1 Samuel 21. During the gap was the time when David finally got all his stuff together and got it all straightened out; he confessed, he was put back in fellowship, and he began to move as king. He had totally resolved the problem of category four, five and six type suffering, he worked it out in his mind, he was able to give thanks for it and move. So what happened between verses 12 and 13. God’s Word has the answer for us in Psalm 56. Psalm 56 was written between verse 12 and verse 13. And this Psalm shows how David finally got things worked around. This is an individual lament Psalm and it repeats itself. In other words, it goes through that cycle of lament, confidence, petition, praise, twice; so an outline of the Psalm would be like this: verses 1-4 is one section; here’s where David petitions God for deliverance and then verses 5-11 is another petition, David petitions God again for deliverance in a different way. So the first four verses are actually part of the lament Psalm; verses 5-11 kind of go through the same cycle. And then verses 12-13 is the praise section of this Psalm. So it is an individual lament Psalm.

The title is interesting, It says” To the chief Musician,” and then if you have the King James it says, “upon Jonath-elem-rehokim,” and of course that’s very plain to all of you, but what it means is “sung to the tune of a dove in a foreign land,” and it’s a very interesting thing, it’s kind of a footnote to these Psalms. It apparently tells us that they had popular songs; the music of which they used and put the lyrics of the song to another song, because this is an instruction to the chief musician that when this is sung, use the following music; take the music from this particular song called “to a dove in a foreign land,” and chant Psalm 56 to that music. And that’s actually how they did it. It is a “Michtam,” a skillful work “of David, when the Philistines took him in Gath.” It refers to the period before his arrest and during his arrest. Now the arrest is going to come later in chapter 21 but I’m showing you the mental processes David used to meet the suffering situation in his life.

Let’s look at verses 1-4, the first section of the Psalm. David is petitioning God in this section for deliverance from the battle with his enemies, in confidence. So verse 1 is your address and preliminary petition; verse 2 speaks of his enemies, there’s the lament; verse 3-4 is his confidence, here’s where he’s expressing his trust. So in verse 1, “Be merciful unto me, O God,” the word “be merciful” refers to grace. David recognizes at this point that he is all fouled up, he’s down right smack in Goliath’s hometown. You can just see David sitting there, how the heck did I get down here. And then taking out the big long sword of Goliath which, you couldn’t hide the thing, anywhere you go, you can imagine how big it was, it was not something you could fold up and put in your hip pocket. There’s no way he could hide this thing, he dragged it all around the place. And you can just see him banging his head on the wall, how dumb can anybody get, sitting down here in Goliath’s hometown with his sword; a real good place for David to disappear. That was smart; and at this point David responded, Lord, I need grace. “Be gracious to me, O God, and he realized he didn’t deserve it, that he’d fouled up, but David wasn’t too proud for grace.

Now just take that as an exhortation; some of you still walk around with guilt over something you’ve done over 28 years ago sometime, or 5 years ago and somebody wants to do something and they think back, oh what if somebody finds out what I did. Who cares what you did in the past? It is what God thinks of your life that counts, not what some other man thinks. So just look at your life from the divine viewpoint; if God has forgiven you, if you have confessed your sin, that’s it. And to drag up all the dirty linen that you specialized in five years or five months ago, that’s ridiculous, that’s beside the point, don’t weigh yourself down with your past, your past doesn’t mean anything except what you’ve learned from it; that’s all. And it’s not to be relived. If you go reliving your life in the past or the future you’ll wind up on the funny farm. There’s only one place to live your life and that is in the present tense. You can’t live in the future so don’t worry. Worry is the sin of trying to live in the future; there’s no way you can live in the future so just cut it out. Live in the present. And there’s no way you can go back and change history, except one way.

There really is only one way you can change history; you may never have thought of the fact that it actually is possible for you to change history and do you know how it is? To accept the grace of God, because God can give in time a decree that wipes out guilt that is truly historic; a true act that you have done or I have done in history can be eliminated from history by God’s grace. Now how does this work? Because grace plus sin turns it into an object lesson and it changes the whole character of that historic act; the whole thing is transformed. So you can affect the past but there’s only one way of doing it and that is to trust in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ and to appropriate that moment by moment in your life.

So, “Be merciful unto me, O God,” David says okay, I’m in a jam, now what? I’m not going to… oh dear, Doeg was there, I shouldn’t have done it, etc. You don’t find David whining and crying about all his past mistakes. He goes on to something else, he hasn’t got time to fuss, he’s got to get on to deal with how he’s going to get out of here. And he comes on a most ingenious system and we’ll take that up next week. “Be merciful unto me, O God; for man would swallow me up; he, fighting daily, oppresses me.”

Now in verse 1 David uses two words that tell us immediately something of David’s spiritual growth. Up to this point David has viewed his problems as well, this problem or that problem or something, but now he uses the word “Elohim” for “God” in contrast to a word in the Hebrew which is rare, it means mankind; here is where you have opening up slowly, the Holy Spirit is revealing slowly in the book of Samuel and in David’s life, a growing perspective of Messiah. Messiah starts out to be just a lone Jewish king but as David begins to deal and jockey into position for the office, what begins to happen. Already you just saw one phrase apply to David that should show you new revelation of the scope of the Messiah. What did they call him in Philistia? The melek ha aretz, “the king of the land,” so you begin to see the opening perspective; the Messiah is big, the Messiah is cosmic.

Now here is where he gets more of that cosmic information. The idea of his universal role as king; all mankind “oppresses me,” David says. How did he come to this awareness? Because before he thought his problems were with just the Jews. David was like a lot of believers, you think your problem is in one little area and David says no, the problem I had with those Jewish people is the same problem I have with Gentile people. And so both on the east side of the battle line with he Hebrews and on the west side of the battle line with the Philistines the problem is the same because man is the same. So that is why he uses the word “mankind would swallow me up.”

David has advanced in his understanding; by the time he writes verse 1 he has given up all hope of fleeing his problem. That tells us immediately that little thing went right out the window. He is not thinking, well look, things are so bad in Philistia, I think I’m going to take a boat to the Aegean and go over and join the Greeks. He could have done that, he could have gone to Cyprus, he could have gone to Crete, there were civilizations, the Minoa civilization, the Mycenae civilization, there were many places on earth David could have gone. Why didn’t he go there? Because by the time he got to Philistia he recognized his problems would not be solved by moving from one geographical area to another geographical area. That doesn’t solve a thing.

“Be merciful unto me, O God, for mankind would swallow me; he, fighting daily oppresses me.” Now the word “daily” is repeated in this Psalm and since it is repeated, this is a point of emphasis. See the word “daily” in verse 1; see the word “daily” in verse 2, see the word “every day” in verse 5? So this is something that is to be noticed in this Psalm. David is under continual pressure. What kind of pressure do you suppose David is under? Right now it’s mental pressure, it’s not physical yet, it’s going to become physical but by the time it becomes physical David is straightened out and he’s going to come up with the smoothest performance you’ve ever seen. But right now the pressure is mental; here he is trapped with Goliath’s sword in Goliath’s home town. You can imagine the pressure, day and night; and he knows, furthermore that the servants of Achish have spotted him. He knows that it’s only a matter of hours, perhaps days, before Achish’s secret police find out where he is in Gath, and he is going to be dead David. So the pressure is on day and night, day and night, every time somebody walks by, every time somebody knocks on the door, are they going to come to arrest me. This is the kind of situation he faced. This is what he means, “fighting daily, they oppress me.”

Now verse 2, here’s a description in detail, this is his lament, examination of his problem in the light of divine viewpoint. “Mine enemies” and the word “enemy” is not the common word in the Hebrew for enemy; this is a word which means to watch or spy, the one’s spying on me, or watching me, “would daily swallow me up,” in other words, I’m under constant surveillance, I have my phone tapped. “…for they are many that fight against me,” and so again he continues this business of surveillance, psychologically David could break down here except the very pressure that he faces in this situation has turned cursing into blessing and David is responding to God’s grace and it’s not “O thou Most High” at the end of verse 2, it means proudly, the word means proudly. “They fight against me proudly,” because now they are sure they think of victory, of annihilating Goliath’s enemy.

Verses 3-4, his confidence. Verses 3-4 show the confidence that David regains between Psalm 59 and Psalm 56. By the time he writes Psalm 56 in Gath, or he writes it after he’s been in Gath but at that time, verses 3-4 prove how he straightened himself out. And verse 3 you’ve often heard this as a memory verse, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee.” That’s a good memory verse; “What time I am afraid,” whenever I am afraid, “I will trust in Thee.” And the word “trust” is batach, and that is that strong word for trusting, it’s not just believing something to be true, it is more than that, it is the advanced state of the mature believer, which also shows you at this point David is back with it again because he’s moving with faith. “Whenever I am afraid, I will batach in You.”

Verse 4, “In God I will praise His word; in God have I put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.” You see, he’s anticipating being arrested by the secret police and being beaten up and interrogated. And this is on his mind. [tape turns] And the promise is, Romans 8:28, you will be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. You will have Christ’s perfect nature in you for all eternity, that is your predestination according to Romans 8:29-30, that is a decree of God, that is the Word and it can’t be broken. It’s immutable, it can’t be broken in any way. You are messiah. Now that’s what he refers to back here when he says, “His Word,” It’s not anything God said, His Word regarding David. Now how did this help him come off the carnal bandwagon here? Well, let’s think about calling for a moment. Let’s think about something in your life. Suppose God has shown you that in addition to being just a simple believer you have a spiritual gift; He has invested certain things in your life by way of training. You have an awareness that God is leading you; many of you don’t have an awareness of exactly where God is leading you but you may have an awareness generally that God has a job for you to do before you die. God has certain things that must be done before you die. Now, when you face a situation like David you can give thanks because those things are going to be done before you die, and therefore you are not going to die before your time. God has decreed certain things or He wouldn’t have given you the training. He wouldn’t have given you the exposure, He wouldn’t have given you the various blessings and the various cursings, the prosperity and the adversity that He has dumped in your lap unless He meant for you to have some great plan in your life.

But, you face a situation like this, you reflect on the continuity of God’s leading. That’s what David is doing when he says “I will praise His Word, in God have I put my trust,” it’s batach again, perfect tense which means that by the time that he wrote verse 4 he had trusted the whole thing and put the whole thing in the Lord’s hands. By this point everything has been solved spiritually speaking. “I will not fear what flesh can do to me.” So at this point David deals with fear. Now this is something you might think he should have dealt with earlier. You say he was out in battle with the Philistines, certainly he must have been afraid time and time again before, why is he just dealing with fear at this point? Because when we have a beaten spirit the fear always comes back. No matter how many times you’ve conquered that fear it will always come back unless you have perfect assurance that you’re in God’s plan. The only way you can perfectly conquer fear and have any victory over it whatever is to know that what you are doing is approved by God Himself. Basically all fear comes from a lack of trust that this really is God’s will that you’ve been called to do. Now he has dealt with his fear problems.

So now we move to verse 5 and verses 5-11 deal with the second round, and we’ll go through this fast since we’ve introduced the principle. “Every day they wrest [distort] my words; all their thoughts are against me for evil,” they are plotting his destruction, in other words. Verse 6, “They gather themselves together, they hide themselves, they mark my steps,” so this went on for some time period as I indicated in the gap between verses 12-13 of 1 Samuel 21. There was a time of surveillance in the city of Gath. “…when they wait for my soul.”

Now verses 7-8 is his petition. And in this petition David begins to solve another problem and that was his original one, category four, five and six type suffering. There are going to be two new things that we are going to learn in this Psalm about undeserved suffering and this should help you in dealing and coping with undeserved suffering in your own life. The first thing we’re going to notice is how David petitions God in verses 7-8. “Shall they escape by iniquity? In Thine anger cast down the peoples, O God. [8] Thou tell [number] my wanderings; put thou my tears into Thy bottle. Are they not in the book?”

Now we have to go through this and analyze it carefully. “Shall they escape by iniquity?” What is David saying? Look, my undeserved suffering is brought to me by what we will call intermediate agencies. In other words, sovereignty of God screens it so that’s the ultimate agency but the sovereignty of God is administered through intermediate agencies, in this case the Philistines, in our case they’d be demon powers, and whatever they are they are always intermediary agencies under God’s sovereignty. Now what David is saying, he suddenly caught on to something. As he’s been sweating it out in this house, listening to these people walk by, listening to them talk out the window and saying hey, David’s around here, you know that guy they sang songs about, he’s in here, we saw him walking through here with Goliath’s sword a while ago. Where is he; let’s search all the houses on this street. And so while listening to this it dawns on him, say, all of this undeserved suffering that I have, if it truly is undeserved and it’s being administered against me by agencies that are on negative volition, that gives me an idea. I can fight back undeserved suffering by praying God’s damnation upon the intermediate agencies, because they are not acting justly. So this gives me a way by imprecatory prayer to batter my way back by annihilating these intermediate agencies.

So the first thing David catches onto is the importance of imprecatory prayer. Now that’s something you probably very rarely ever hear from the pulpit. The reason is that few ministers have studied the Psalms well enough to master the problem of the imprecatory Psalms. Imprecatory Psalms are like this one at verse 7; this is an imprecatory phrase. Imprecatory is a vocabulary word that describes this kind of verse: damn the enemy, that’s an imprecatory prayer request. And there are Psalms, vicious Psalms in God’s Word to damn the enemy, and every once in a while you’ll run across some person who’s had a kindergarten introduction to the Bible and is now on a college faculty somewhere who is ridiculing the Bible and saying the God of the Old Testament is an ugly God, and the God of the New Testament, He’s so sweet; that kind of thing. And when you ask them, where’s the ugly God in the Old Testament? Well, it’s those imprecatory Psalms, why, in the Old Testament they prayed for damnation on the enemies and the New Testament says love your enemies. Well, in the Old Testament the imprecatory Psalms are directed against the intermediary agencies of undeserved suffering. And in the New Testament it is too; there are imprecatory requests made against the demon powers because in the New Testament the secondary means are the demonic powers.

This, therefore, gives David… remember he’s a military man, he’s always thinking about taking the offense instead of taking the defense, he says this undeserved suffering gives me a very excellent opportunity to undo the enemy. While he’s sitting here clobbering me with undeserved suffering I’m going to fire a few back. So this gives me an opportunity to damn them. And so therefore, applying this to your life, this doesn’t be applied to other people in the New Testament context, it is applied to the demon powers, the principalities and powers of darkness which can be damned legitimately by Christians through imprecatory prayer. And it’s your right as a believer to pray damnation; it is your right as a believer as you prepare for the church service here, to pray damnation upon any demons of distraction that would cause things to happen here, that would destroy people’s ability to concentrate on the Word of God. Now I’m not saying that every time there’s a distraction it’s demonically caused; people can do enough of that themselves. And I’m not saying that the insomniacs who can’t sleep except in the church pew, that that’s demonic either, but there are cases of genuine demonic activity where we can have obstructions to the teaching of the Word of God. Well, here’s one of those things, damn them God.

Verse 7 is an imprecatory petition, and this is the first thing David finds out about undeserved suffering; it gives me a chance to damn the intermediate powers of destruction. They’re not going to escape by their iniquity. Then he says in verse 8, Lord, “You tell my wanderings,” now the word “wanderings” is the second piece of evidence that we have. The word means aimless wanderings and it refers to the kind of wandering done between 1 Samuel 19 and 21, that kind of wandering, nod kind of wandering, nod is the Hebrew word, and this refers to the time when he as unstable. David says Lord, I know that you know what I’ve been through. I know that you’ve seen me frustrated, I haven’t been able to cope with this problem in my life, and I’ve had this much of it and now I’ve finally dealt with the problem; you know that.

So this gives David confidence that God understands him and he says, “put my tears into your bottle.” Now if you have a New Scofield Bible will notice a cultural note on the bottom, [“Sometimes, in olden days in the East, mourners would catch their tears in bottles (water skins) and place them at the tombs of their loved ones.”] which is a good one and that is the correct answer to this term. And that is that this was used in ancient times, they would take tears while they were being shed and during the funeral, they’d put them in a bottle and seal the bottle and put it into the tomb of the person. Why? Because the tears would be a historic memorial to the fact that other people thought this much about the person. So when David turns and he says “put my tears into Your bottle” he is asking God to erect a historic memorial to his love for the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, he has resolved his problem, “my tears into Thy bottle,” I have shed my tears and my problem and I now see it from the godly point of view. I have beaten my way through to understand this thing, and I want my suffering memorialized in history. And of course it is because Psalm 56 is the memorial. “Are these things,” not “they,” “Are these things in Thy book?” question, meaning that they are, they are recorded in God’s history book.

Verse 9-11 is his recognition, “When I cry unto Thee,” there you see he’s operating positively, now he’s not fleeing, “when I cry unto Thee, then shall mine enemies turn back; this I know; for God is for me.” Now the key word is the verb, verse 9, to know, it means to come to a recognition of something, I have discovered. Now David knew this before. What is it then in verse 9 that he discovers. He discovers that God is for him in the middle of undeserved suffering. See, he wasn’t sure of this before, because the first time you get hit with a case of undeserved suffering usually what happens it goes something like this: Lord, you must be against me for some reason, You’ve got it in for me. Now the fact that he’s discovered here God is for me, means that he labels this as undeserved suffering, not deserved suffering. This whole thing was triggered off by undeserved suffering and so he has the confidence, this isn’t discipline in my life, I don’t have to walk around with a guilt complex any more, I’ve taken care of what sin was involved and really, not too much sin was involved in this particular problem, and all the rest of it was undeserved suffering. So “I know,” and I have come to recognize, “God is for me.”

So the logical result, verses 10-11, it happens in every believer’s life, when you have the confidence that God is for you, “In God will I praise His Word; in the LORD will I praise His Word.” See that word “Word” again? Same thing referred to as in verse 4, God’s plan for his life. And so we come to the second great breakthrough David made in handling undeserved suffering. The first breakthrough was that it offered him a chance to get back at God’s enemies. Just think of it, every time undeserved suffering comes your way God is actually forcing Satan to be put in jeopardy, because it gives you the opportunity to blast back. Now the second thing David has found about undeserved suffering is that no suffering that you will ever face is bigger than God’s plan for your life. There will never be a situation that you will ever face under any circumstance that is bigger than God’s plan for your life. And this is why everything hinges on His Word; His Word, look how many times he speaks of it here, “In God will I praise His word,” it means that I praise His plan for my life; “in the LORD will I praise His plan for my life.” Verse 11, “In God have I put my trust,” he repeats verse 4, “I will not be afraid what man can do unto me.” And that ends his confidence.

And finally the last two verses, [12] “Thy vows are upon me, O God; I will render praises unto Thee. [13] For Thou hast delivered my soul from death. Will not You deliver my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of the living.” Now the last two verses show a little bit more about how David arrived at a solution to his problem. “Thy vows are upon me” means that he owes it to God to give verbal public testimony to God’s saving acts, just like we, when we praise God, praising God in the Bible means you rehearse in public His historic work on your behalf. You don’t even tell about the little details of God’s grace in your heart because you don’t know God’s grace in your heart, I don’t know God’s grace in my heart, nobody knows your heart that well to give testimony to what God’s grace is doing down there. We do know what God’s grace has done in history, we do know what God’s grace did outside the city walls of Jerusalem 19 centuries ago; we do know what God’s grace did in the tomb that’s now empty that wasn’t before. We do know God’s grace in these matters, and that is what we give praise to Him for.

So this is why “Thy vows are upon me,” that means my obligation to be an ambassador. “O God, I will render praises unto Thee,” that is, I will rehearse. The reason the Psalms end up with praise is because in the Bible God’s deliverance is never finished until it results in praise. You can go through everything and have everything, the Exodus occurs and everything; the Exodus does not finish in Exodus chapter 14; that’s the end of the historic crossing. The Exodus ends in Exodus chapter 15, when you have a hymn to commemorate the crossing. So God’s salvation under the master plan is in order to give praise to the Creator, that God alone is worthy of all creature praise. And until that is finished, salvation is not. This is why these Psalms end with a vow to praise, the act of salvation must be accompanied by a final testimony. “

“I will render praise unto Thee, For,” verse 13, here’s the reason, “For Thou hast delivered my soul from death.” Now where did that happen, it hasn’t happened yet in Gath, has it? Well then where does it happen in verse 13? Verse 13 refers to the seven times that David escaped from Saul’s assassination attempts. And while he is in Gath it dawns on him, and while he’s sweating in someone’s broom closet, waiting for Achish’s secret police to pull him out, he’s meditating on the Word. See, he hasn’t meditated on the Word for probably weeks because he’s been running; so God has just put him in an old broom closet some place and said tell you what buddy, you can’t do anything now, can you, except meditate on My Word, I’ve got you just exactly where I want you, because you’ve got no TV in the closet, nothing to read, and nothing in there except what you have memorized of God’s Word and that’s all that you can think about.

So David thought about it and said you know, I am kind of stupid, here I fled all the way down to Gath to get away from Saul and what has God just done for me seven times? Seven times in a row Saul tried to kill me; what did God do every one of those seven times? He caused me to be delivered; He caused me to be delivered from his spear three times, got me out of Michal’s house once, got me out of the seminary, got me out of the army deal, got me out of all sorts of things. He did it seven times, so he says, I haven’t praised you for that yet Father, so verse 13, “You have delivered my soul from death, that refers backward to the past things that God had done up to that point. “Will you not then,” and here’s his look to the future, “deliver my feet from falling,” which is another synonym for death. If You saved me seven times from Saul, then You’re going to save me from the Philistines.

And then the last phrase, notice the purpose clause at the end of verse 13, “that I may walk before God in the light of the living.” Not in sheol, “of the living.” Why? Because of the dabar, because of the Word of God, that is mentioned in verse 10 and 11, “His plan for my life, His plan for my life, His plan for my life.” What is God’s plan for David’s life. Samuel said you will be my king. In sheol? No, in Israel, in the land of the living. So therefore David appropriates this knowledge that God has a plan for his life and he works backwards. And he says now look, if it’s God’s plan for my life to be king, I don’t have to worry about these dumb Philistines.

Next week we’re going to find out what a funny and ingenious plan David came up with.