1 Samuel Lesson 35
David is Delivered – 1 Samuel
Before we get to Psalm 34 we have to go back to 1 Samuel 21 to pick up
where we left David. By way of review, 1
Samuel 21-22 deal with the period of David’s life during the persecution
phase. And during the persecution phase
of David’s life he experienced several things, and in chapter 21-22 we have the
time when he was humbled before God by a failure in his human viewpoint
strategy. This actually consists of two
parts; we dealt with the first mistake he made in 21:1-9 and picked it up again
in 22:6-23 that dealt with his hastiness among the priests at Nob, and leaving
obviously a tremendous loss to that community, wiping it out, not directly but
by his mistake. In connection with the
first tactical mistake Psalm 59 was written.
In connection with the second tactical mistake he made, which starts at
Now beginning at verse 10 we have a second error; this one isn’t so much
a matter of timing as much as it’s an error in geographic location. The first one was an error in time, the
second one is an error in space. Here
David manifests what always happens when we are out of it and that is manifest
laws of common sense, and we find him trying to disappear and remain
inconspicuous in, of all places, Goliath’s home town, with of all things,
Goliath’s own word. This doesn’t strike
you as being too smart. After David
finally woke up it didn’t strike him as being too smart either but while he was
out of fellowship momentarily and made a bad decision it looked pretty good to
him.
This shows you that when we’re out of fellowship we always have a
blindness. This blindness, don’t think
of as just spiritual; we have a tendency in Christianity, particularly in
fundamentalist circles of dividing knowledge between what we call head
knowledge and heart knowledge. There’s
no such thing; we have what we call material knowledge and spiritual knowledge,
there is no boundary, they are both the same.
When God reveals Himself He doesn’t reveal Himself to us in mystery; He
doesn’t reveal Himself to us in the darkness of the closet some place. He reveals Himself to us in public. After all, where was Jesus crucified? Not inside a Roman jail, He was crucified out
on the hill where everybody could see it.
Where did He minister? In
public. When God revealed the Word on
When God chose to reveal Himself to Saul on the
Now I dare say if we had the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ
physically, as He looks in the book of Revelation 1-2, we’d all fall on the
floor too. But it’s not because the Holy
Spirit comes and knocks you down to the floor.
The Holy Spirit is not interested in knocking anybody over; He’s not
interested in overpowering your nerve system; that is satanic; Satan is
interested in overpowering your nerve system.
When God’s revelation appears to man it fits what man was created for;
man was created to be able to handle God’s revelation. And whenever you have these weird kind of
experiences, you can bet that they are something for which we are not designed
and therefore it is not the work of the Holy Spirit; it’s the work of something
else, but it’s not the work of the Holy Spirit.
Furthermore, whenever the Holy Spirit operates, according to John, He
operates in order to glorify Jesus Christ.
And the emphasis is never on the Holy Spirit when the Holy Spirit is
working. When the Holy Spirit is working
the emphasis is always on Jesus Christ, period; nothing else. So wherever you have an operation of the Holy
Spirit that glorifies the Holy Spirit, there’s something wrong. The Holy Spirit does not want to glorify
Himself, that’s not His job.
Now in verse 10, by way of review, David was afraid of Saul and here is
where, because he has not taken time to be with the Lord, pressure has forced
him out of fellowship momentarily. This
is David, he believed on Jesus Christ as a very young man according to the
evidence of Scripture, he progressed spiritually at a fantastic rate, he was
born again and he was in what we call the top circle; that is he was
predestined to be conformed to Christ and so on. Here’s the bottom circle of temporal
fellowship with God and David is out of fellowship, he is out here, and out
here he obviously manifests a lack of the Holy Spirit’s illuminating ministry,
which manifests itself in a lack of common sense. His behavior is erratic. This is one way that you can tell when you’re
out of fellowship. And this is another
little test that you can use; people think when you’re out of fellowship you’re
going to get very gross. Not
necessarily. When you’re out of
fellowship you’ll be going along and all of a sudden you’ll have some erratic
change in your behavior pattern, just like that. And these erratic points just simply show
there’s something wrong down in the heart some place. So here David is, he is having trouble and his
behavior is very erratic. David, the man who slew Goliath, David the man who
was a fantastic officer in the service would never have made a tactical mistake
like this. This blunder is completely
out of line, just way out for David.
So we found that after he went to
And that often is the story in believer’s lives, when we’re rushing
along at 60 mph doing this, doing that, doing something else, God just has to,
through sickness, through some adversity, through some way put us in a place
where we’re on the shelf for a while.
And He puts us there in order for us to get straightened out. And David
here, obviously is hiding from the secret police of
Now in category four, five and six type suffering David wanted to know,
because he had never faced this in intense form, why is it that he was
suffering. He didn’t do anything wrong
to Saul, why should Saul be after him.
David had a straightforward understanding of evil and suffering. Now he has to learn three new
categories. And Psalm 56 teaches us that
by this time David understood, he had studied, he had prayed, he had meditated,
and come to a solution and category four type suffering, which is the suffering
that we incur by virtue of our position in Christ while we are living in
Satan’s world. We are living in a
hostile environment, and only as you mature in Christ are you aware of the
depths and the powerful forces that surround us. This is one reason why no new Christian
should ever be placed in a leadership position, never, because new believers do
not understand the tremendous depth and intensity of the evil forces in the
world, called the cosmos in Scripture.
And only when you are aware of the depth of the power and the
organization of these forces are you prepared to appreciate the provisions that
Jesus Christ has made.
Now in category four suffering David, by his language in Psalm 56, comes
to understand that the issue is not one of a few Jews against him, Saul and his
henchmen, it’s not an issue of a few soldiers of the king of
And David goes under the fifth kind of suffering, also in Psalm 56,
category type five suffering is when you have to learn spiritual truths by
suffering. In other words, because of
the fall and because of subsequent truth that has to be learned, there are some
things that we cannot learn except by getting our head beat up against the
wall. This is why we suffer, this is
another reason why we suffer and David realized, in his case, he had to secure
his throne God’s way, by grace. This is
politics by grace. And beginning at this
point you have an entire handbook inside of God’s Word that is directed toward
anyone who would seek public office.
This is a manual on how to do it.
David had to learn how to seek civil authority and he was put on his
throne by God’s grace. And actually in 2
Samuel we’ll find out how he had to learn to exercise his authority, because
every time a person is in a type of situation like David they’re always victims
of people who want to challenge their authority. And this is always a problem and you have to
learn how to handle this.
Category six type suffering means it is a witness, I suffer because I
have to bear witness to the truth, to both believer, unbeliever and angels, and
the powers and principalities in the air around us. So those are the three areas of witness and
David understands this, at least in Psalm 56 he is going to be a tremendous
witness down through history, people are going to look at him and rejoice.
Now Psalm 56 was an individual lament Psalm. There are many different kind of Psalms;
individual lament Psalms are Psalms that stress petition; they are Psalms
written by an individual in the middle of a pressure situation, and they speak
and emphasize his petition. There is
another kind of Psalm that we’ll see tonight, the individual declarative praise
Psalm. But before we see that, let’s go
back to the 1 Samuel text and pick it up where we left it at verse 13.
Some time has elapsed, between verse 12 and verse 13 David has written
Psalm 56; between verses 12-13 David has straightened himself out with certain
help from the Lord Jesus Christ. Now
this is a very interesting speculation and we can’t be dogmatic about this, but
I’m going to show you from Psalm 34 that it is entirely probably that wherever
David was hiding in the city of Gath, that one day the Lord Jesus Christ
personally appeared to him and gave him the idea for doing what he is going to
do. Verse 13 is not a very pretty kind
of verse. This should just blow some of
your minds because some of you get up tight when we come to something like
this. Evidently, as I will try to show
you from Psalm 34, Jesus Christ gave him the idea; Jesus Christ put this idea
in David’s head.
Now visualize the situation first or you won’t understand what he is
doing. He is a POW at this point, David
has been arrested, between verses 12-13 the secret police have caught up with
him and in verse 13 he is now under arrest.
He is in the hands of the police of Gath; the henchmen have finally
found him. But before he was arrested, before he was arrested, you remember
what he did in Psalm 56? He prayed. God answered that prayer, and before he was
arrested the Lord gave him a fantastic plan of escape.
Now we have to explore certain things to understand this verse. The first thing we want to understand is that
there are various survival techniques that are taught in the military service
for handling your service as a POW.
Generally speaking, depending on your branch of service, you have to go,
if it looks like you’re going to be serving in an area where you can be
captured, you have to go to certain courses in which are taught to you escape
and evasion tactics, survival tactics.
If you’re down in some area you have to learn how to live off the land,
or how you can survive interrogation. So
the services over the years have developed various classified and some
unclassified tactics that are taught to our soldiers to handle themselves in a
prison situation.
One of these tactics is used by David and it was originally taught to him by
Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ gave him a
crash course in survival and it’s the most magnificent story of how God
provided for David’s every need. David would never have made it in Gath. Here he is, they’ve got the goods on him,
yeah, he’s David, he’s the guy that killed our Goliath and there’s the sword to
prove it, so they’ve got him dead to right.
And here’s the point; God in His sovereignty promised that David would
reign on the throne. So now look at the
jam, David, through negative volition has got himself in a mess. God, however, in His sovereignty has said
David, you’re going to sit on the throne, and even though David screws up and
even though David is going to suffer for it, even though 85 priests have been
brutally slain, slaughtered along with their wives, children, dogs, cats,
birds, and everything else at Nob, in spite of all of this the suffering that
we incur through rebellion against God’s plan in our life, when God promises to
get you to point B from point A you’ll get there. And this is something you can fall back on
when disaster hits in the Christian life.
Romans 8:29, you are predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus
Christ. And I don’t care how many times
you drop the ball, how many times you get out of fellowship, how many times you
miss the boat, God has sovereignly decreed you will arrive at point B from
point A, point A being where you started the Christian life, point B being when
you are ultimately sanctified, totally, positionally, experientially and
ultimately. God has sovereignly
promised this.
Therefore, a major issue is created because God is sovereign He is
righteous, He is just, He is loving, He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent,
immutable and eternal. These are God’s
attributes, now when God faces a situation where in His sovereignty He has
promised to do something specific, and through negative volition we have
violated His plan for our life, now the issue is, can God vindicate His
character, because Satan will say aha, now David is down there and he’s dropped
the ball, he’s out of it, he’s rebelled, true he was deceived, etc. etc. etc.,
but he’s out of fellowship. Now David is
down there God, and You sovereignly said you were going to get him to the
throne, how You gonna do it? God has
got to work in history in such a way that he doesn’t coerce volition. This is a great mystery which cannot be
understood by the finite mind. But God
has sovereignly said David is going to sit on that throne, yet Satan has got
David down right where he wants him, right in Satan’s stronghold. He is surrounded by Philistines, he has
incurred the wrath of the enemy, Saul’s army is in no shape to engage a military
diversion by attacking the Philistine army, David is all by himself, completely
in the bounds of Satan at this point. It
looks like it’s a total victory for Satan, he’s got David exactly where he
wants him because if Satan can get David outside of the plan of God, what has
he shown about God’s character? God is
not sovereign, or if God is sovereign, He’s not omnipotent, He is unable to
deliver the goods that he promises.
So that’s the situation and Jesus Christ comes and teaches David a
survival tactic. Now let’s understand
why the survival tactic of this type. In
the ancient world people who were crazy were looked upon as protected by the
gods; they were not molested in certain cultures, and from what we can gather,
we can just guess about this, but it appears that in Philistia it was part of
the culture of the ancient world that when somebody went nuts, they just stayed
away from them, they did not hurt them, they did not harm them, because it was
felt that these people were being dealt with by the gods, and if you harmed
somebody who was being dealt with by the gods, you would be harmed by the gods
who were dealing with that person. And
so there was a cultural point about this whole thing that you have to
understand. It is that the Philistines
apparently believed that the insane must be treated and handled with care, you
just leave them alone.
Now this is not strange, in the modern world, in the Korean War and
other wars, the military intelligence would specialize in finding out where the
cultural weaknesses of the enemy were.
And so you would study and find out where the people who were in charge
of the jail and so on, where did those people have a cultural flaw or weakness
that you could take advantage of in your survival and escape tactics. And if you found a flaw in their culture,
such as, suppose you have a culture somewhere and they can’t stand homosexuals
or something, obviously what you do is you just feign homosexuality, just
pretend you’re a bunch of homos in there and they’ll leave you alone. This is what we mean by utilizing a flaw in
the other side’s culture. And so David
has been taught this by Jesus Christ, that the Philistines have a little error
in their culture here, completely wrong in their belief, but you can take
advantage of it, it’s a weakness on their side.
So David, in verse 13, begins to put into effect his plan for survival
and escape. “And he changed his behavior
before them, and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled [made marks]
on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard.” Now this is a most magnificent picture of the
king of Israel. Obviously this is a
humiliating thing that he has to go through, and it’s forever preserved by the
Holy Spirit in Scripture so that no one in Israel can ever forget it, but God
had a sense of humor; God has a tremendous sense of humor, you can remember the
things that happened to Saul and here something very unusual and peculiar is
happening to David. God has the
circumstance engineered where David, who will one day become the greatest king
of the world, is walking with spit drooling off the end of his beard. Why?
Because he has to undergo this lesson, category five suffering, to learn
a principle.
So “he changed his behavior,” literally the word “behavior” means
understanding, he changed his mind, in other words, he mimicked insanity, he
changed his mind from a sane individual to someone insane. I presume that he had something else going
for him here, for don’t you suppose the Philistine intelligent system was wise
enough to know what was going on with Saul; he was nuts too, so here’s the guy
that’s going to be Saul’s successor, you’d expect him to be crazy, all those
Jewish kings are nuts. And so David just
let them entertain their delusion. And
so it was a very clever tactic, even though it may seem odd it’s not odd at
all, it’s just his method for diversionary tactics toward the enemy. So “he changed his mental behavior before
them, he feigned himself mad in their hands,” now the word “before them,” it’s
not before them, it means in their eyes, and it’s a Hebrew idiom that refers to
in their opinion. And that’s the whole
point of verse 13, it’s one phrase, “in their eyes he changed his mind,” in
other words, he really didn’t change his mind, he only changed it in their eyes,
in their opinion he was nuts, but he wasn’t.
It was very clever.
So as far as they were concerned he changed his behavior, “and feigned
himself mad,” now the word here for “mad” means tottering, and it’s a beautiful
picture, notice the last part, the prepositional phrase of that clause, “he
feigned himself mad in their hands,” in other words, here you have these men,
they’ve arrested him, and they’ve grabbed hold of him and they’re walking him
down the street and David’s tottering, the word “feigned himself mad” means to
totter, it is used for drunkenness in all the other references in
Scripture. So as these Philistine police
grab hold of him the idea hits, I’ll just pretend I’m out of it, and so he
starts babbling away in Hebrew or something and they speak another language,
and then he’s tottering around, so they, right at this point begin to report
into the king. It gets funnier as it
goes on.
And they take him through the gates to the palace, so when he gets to
the gates, he scrapes on the door, he scratches on the door, and this was a
sign also in the ancient world, in ancient literature this was often a sign of
the insane, they’d just go around and draw pictures of idiotic things on the
boards. Of course we have people do that
today and they aren’t crazy; maybe they are.
But David did this as he went through the palace gates. He grabbed something, a piece of charcoal or
something, and right on Achish’s royal gates he started scribbling, all of
it. All of these things are traits of
the insane. And then of course he had
the spit rolling down his beard, and that just added to it.
So verse 14, they bring him into the palace in the presence of King
Achish, “Then said Achish unto his servants, Lo, you see the man is mad,” in
other words, it’s a participle, he is constantly showing signs of madness; he
is doing this, “why have you brought him to me?” And they were going to bring him to
interrogate but Achish’s question, “why have you brought him to me” has reference
to the cultural handling of an insane person.
Don’t arrest him and bring him under my authority, I’ve got enough
problems, I don’t want to incur the wrath of the gods that are dealing with
this guy, get him out of here. In other
words, it was like somebody had leprosy; a person who was insane would be
handled like that, he’d say I don’t want him around here, and that’s exactly
the behavior pattern that David wanted to get.
The last part appears to be related to some… we have unreliable
traditions in this area culturally, we’re not sure of this, but there are some
Jewish traditions, extra-biblical, that say that this particular king also had
a problem with his wife, she was nuts and not only was his wife crazy but he
had a whole group of advisors in his palace that were nuts. And this is credible in the fact that it may
have been God’s discipline on Gath. You
see God was disciplining Gath for attacking Israel, for their anti-Semitism,
and it would fall under the provisions of Genesis 12:1. So it’s not altogether unexpected that there
might be this kind of thing, but don’t put that as the Word of God, that’s just
some rabbinic extra-biblical tradition.
But in verse 15 the question seems to sound as though that really were
the case. Achish says, “Have I need of
mad men, that you have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my
presence? Shall this fellow come into my
house?” I’ve got enough of them, I don’t
need any more in my house. And it would
probably be also a sarcastic remark to Saul.
Now Saul’s nuts up there in the hills and he’s got this guy and he’s
nuts and I don’t need any nuts around here.
So David succeeded. Now we aren’t
told, chapter 21 just ends with verse 15; the next verses, 22:1, “David,
therefore, departed thence,” we don’t know exactly how he did it but somehow he
escaped and he came to the cave of Adullam.
We’re going to take up verses 1-2 next week, I’m going to shift to Psalm
34 but before we go there I just want to look at verse 1-2 so you can get the
setting; for whom was Psalm 34 written historically. It is written to four hundred men. That Psalm was originally given to four
hundred of these men; let’s see verse 1-2.
“David, therefore, departed from there, and escaped to the cave,
Adullam; and when his brethren and all his father’s house heard it, they went
down there to him.” Now look at what
David has secured? He’s secured his
father’s home to his side, he’s got the priest on his side. Verse 2, “And every one who was in distress,
and every one who was in debt, and every one who was discontented, gathered
themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him
about four hundred men.” Now what a
motley crew, you can imagine. But these
four hundred men become the nucleus of the greatest army the world has ever
seen. Those four hundred men are later
on going to become officers in David’s army, and here is the beginning of the
armies that conquer all the way up to the Tigris-Euphrates valley and all the
way down almost to the Nile River, within a generation they conquered every
nation in that area. David will conquer
all the area and bring it into submission to God’s children on Mount Zion. So these four hundred men, though they look
very despicable in verse 2, they turn out to be great men.
Now Psalm 34 was their first chapter in military training and Psalm 34
was written for these kinds of men.
Let’s look at Psalm 34. Psalm 56
was an individual lament Psalm stressing petition and trouble. Psalm 34 is an individual declarative praise
Psalm that stresses thanksgiving for an historic deliverance. Psalm 56 looked forward to the answer to his
prayer; Psalm 34 looks backward to the answer to prayer. Psalm 56 was written in time of trouble in
order to secure revelation and deliverance.
Psalm 56 was written after the deliverance came and was written in
thanksgiving for the deliverance.
Now the declarative praise of the Old Testament always has reference to
a specific thing that God has done. Declarative
praise means I declare something that God has done in history. So praising God means to relate a historic
work that God has done. Actually, if you
think of it for a moment, if you have witnessed Jesus Christ to an unbeliever
you have praised God because you have declared His works, that is if you have
witnessed properly, you have declared His works, not your experience, you have
declared God’s objective historic works.
Let’s look at Psalm 34, it’s a declarative praise Psalm, it has several sections. It has two major sections, verses 1-3, verses
4-10 and verses 11-22. Verses 1-3 David
invites the downtrodden to join him in praise.
Let’s look at verses 1-3; the first verse includes the Psalm
heading. “A Psalm of David, when he
changed his behavior before Abimelech, who drove him away, and he
departed.” It should be “before the
Abimelech,” Abimelech is the title of a Philistine king, not a proper
name. Now that adds information to 1
Samuel; remember I said in 1 Samuel we don’t know, all we read is he appeared
before the king, and then he’s escaped.
The verb “drive away” gives us the extra information we need. David was driven out as a mad man.
Verse 1, “I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall
continually be in my mouth. [2] My soul shall make her boast in the LORD; the
humble shall hear of it, and be glad. [3] Oh, magnify the LORD with me, and let
us exalt His name together.” Now “the
humble” that are mentioned in verse 2 literally are “the humbled ones,” plural,
“the humbled ones.” Who do you think are
those “humbled ones?” The “humbled ones”
are the four hundred men in the cave; you see, he’s escaped now, the news has
gotten out, and he begins to train the soldiers. David is using a principle that we do not use
in our military but the North Vietnamese do in theirs, and that is the first
thing that you do in training soldiers is before you train them how to use
weapons, and before you train your soldiers, even with PT, you train them
spiritually to understand the cause for which they are fighting. And if you don’t do that you can forget all
the PT and all the weapons training and so on because it’s a waste of
time.
Now the North Vietnamese have developed a fantastic system of
indoctrinating their soldiers. They take
people with fourth and fifth grade education and train them and train them and
train them in communist doctrine until they could voice that doctrine, not
parrot it, not just learn it for an exam, but they learned it so well that the
interrogators that the Americans used from the POW camps on the North
Vietnamese would throw them curve ball questions and everything else and these
soldiers immediately would come up with consistent answer, consistent answer,
consistent answers. It shows you they had been trained and trained and trained
in communist doctrine and can apply it to many, many different situations. They know the cause for which they are
fighting and the only weapon we have against it is Bible doctrine, and of course
we can’t use the Bible because the Supreme Court might get upset.
But verses 1-3 deal with how David trained his soldiers, the first kind
of training. These men were not pros
when they came to the cave, they were all amateurs, they didn’t know how to use
a bow, a sword or anything else. And so
Psalm 34 is tremendous because this is a glimpse of how the first training
started. Verse 2, “My soul shall make
her boast in the LORD,” so immediately in verse 2 he teaches his soldiers
something, that your confidence is in the Lord, not in yourself; he gets that
lesson across. “…the humble one are
going to hear of it and they are going to be glad.” They’re going to be glad many times, it’s
imperfect tense, they’re going to be glad because they’re going to fight battle
after battle in the ensuing years as David conquers not only the land of Israel
but he conquers nations outside. There
are going to be many, many times when those four hundred men are going to be
glad that they sang this Psalm in the cave of Adullam and learned these
lessons.
So David, in verse 3, invites all the four hundred men, because of God’s
historic work with me, I ask you, “let us exalt His name together.” So you produce a unity of spiritual purpose
in the soldiers. The whole group is
unified to a spiritual purpose.
Now beginning with verse 4 running through verse 10 we have David’s
exhortation to his army to become joyous and to learn to trust. In verse 4-5 he gives his straight
exhortation which summarizes his experience in Gath. “I sought the LORD, and He heard me, and
delivered me from all my fears. [5] They looked unto Him, and were enlightened
[radiant], and their faces were not ashamed.”
Now verse 5 is a very tough section in the Hebrew and it should be
translated by imperatives, and most editors, the RSV is one modern translation
that’s done this, “You all look unto Him, and be enlightened, and your faces,
let them not be ashamed.” It’s an
exhortation to his men. Why? Because of verse 4, “I sought the LORD,” now
the word “sought” tells us something, what happened in Gath, because this word
is darash, and this says that you
have to spend time, darash means an
intensive search that takes time.
Now when did David have the time to darash
the Lord? While he was hiding from the
police in Gath. Now what David did here
in Gath was he darash-ed and part of
that darash is Psalm 56. “I besought the LORD, He heard me” and we’re
going to see in a moment how He heard him, “and He delivered me from all my
fears.” Now the word to deliver can mean
supernatural or natural delivery. In
this case was David’s deliverance from Gath by supernatural means or was it by
natural means. Obviously it was by quite
natural by quite natural means. Does it
make it any less praiseworthy? No,
because who gave him the idea for it.
You see, he spent time thinking on the Word, and after you spend time
thinking on the Word, all of a sudden a solution to his problem came to his
mind, I know what I’m going to do. It
was either that way or the Lord Jesus Christ actually talked to him and gave
him the idea.
So verse 5 he stops his accounting of it and he switches to his men and
he says, “Now you look unto Him … and don’t you ever be ashamed.” That word, being ashamed, means to be
embarrassed over something that doesn’t work.
When you look unto Him, and you’ll be enlightened, your faces are never
going to have to be ashamed. And David’s
armies never were ashamed. David’s
armies attained victory after victory after victory after victory. He had a tremendous military career ahead of
him.
Verse 6, he goes back and he tells his experience, “This poor man
cried,” the word “poor” means afflicted, and it refers to his persecutions
through Saul and through Achish. “This
afflicted man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.”
And then in verse 7 he draws a principle, and apparently this is a key
to what happened there in Gath. God the
Holy Spirit has not seen fit to tell us all the details; we’re naturally
curious, we’d like to know what happened down there, but the Holy Spirit has
only given us a few verses in the Word to describe it. Some day maybe we can talk to David and find
out all these little things that happened.
But there’s a hint given in this verse.
“The angel of the LORD encamped round about,” it’s a participle meaning
He continually “encamps round about them who fear him, and He delivers
them.” Now it’s all plural in verse 7,
which means that it refers to a principle, but in order for the principle to be
valid it’s got to have happened
historically. And since this is
an individual declarative praise Psalm, how do you suppose the principle ever
comes out. Obviously the angel of the
Lord must have appeared to David.
Let me show you three other places where the angel of the Lord appears,
and He’s always spoken of the angel of the Lord, and whenever the angel of the
Lord appears in Scripture, or He’s talked about, it always refers to an
appearance, we call it a Christophany or a Theophany. Turn to Genesis 18, I want you to notice how
the angel of the Lord appears. [tape
turns]
… he had to buy the land to bury his wife, they come back 400 years
later and they own the whole place. Now
in that case it wasn’t due to ingenuity, it was due to grace, God gave them the
land. But here Abraham is a wandering
traveler. Now notice the form that the
angel of the Lord appeared. It says “Now the LORD,” singular, appeared to him,
but look at verse 2, “And he lift up his eyes and looked, and lo, three men
stood by him,” why do you suppose the Lord, when He showed up showed up as
three men? The Trinity, and here you
have the Trinity in the Old Testament.
“…three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from
the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, [3] And said, My Lord,”
there was something about those three men that he knew immediately Abraham knew
who it was. But that is an historic
appearance of the angel of the Lord. He
appeared as a traveler, to whom? A
traveler. Abraham is a traveler and the
man appears to him as a traveler.
Now turn to Exodus 3:2, the burning bush. This is Moses and the angel of the Lord
appears again. “And the angel of the
LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked,
and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.” What does the bush represent there? Israel.
Where is Israel now? In the
furnace of affliction of Egypt and she’s being burned but she’s going to
survive. And so how does the angel of
the Lord appear to Moses? In sympathy
with the people, in sympathy with the situation. Israel is in the burning furnace of
affliction and she’s not going to be destroyed, so the angel of the Lord shows
up as a flame of fire, a burning bush that never bush that never burns to the
ground. The angel of the Lord is in
sympathy with the need of the believer at the moment. To Abraham He came as a traveler; to Moses He
comes as a [can’t understand word] of affliction; it’s as though God says yes,
I know exactly your trial, and I’ve provided for every part of it.
A third time the angel of the Lord appears, Joshua 5:13, Joshua has
conducted some reconnaissance around the city of Jericho, “And it came to pass,
when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked and, behold,
there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand; and Joshua
went up to him, and said unto him, Are you for us, or for our enemies? [14] And he said, Nay, but as captain of the
host of the LORD am I now come. And
Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What
saith my lord unto his servant? [15] And
the captain of the LORD’s host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off thy
foot; for the place whereon thou stand is holy.” What did the Lord tell Moses at the burning
bush? Loose thy shoe from off thy
foot. [can’t understand words] to show
continuity, that he’s the same one that appeared to Moses says the same thing
to Joshua, get your shoes off, this is
holy ground. But how does the angel of
the Lord appear to Joshua? As a military commander, “the captain of the host of
the Lord.” See, Joshua thought he was,
that’s what started him to think about it because he was the commander in
chief, he thought. And then all of a
sudden this guy says I’m the commander in chief. And this is Jesus Christ. So how for the third time does the angel of
the Lord appear to believers is in situations.
He appears in perfect conformity with their need.
But we don’t know how the angel of the Lord appeared to David, but we
can guess that He probably appeared to David in some way compatible with
David’s situation as the afflicted one.
That is the experience, now if you turn back to Psalm 34:7, here the
angel of the Lord again must have appeared to David. As I say, the Holy Spirit
has not given us the details, but apparently He appeared to David and He
probably, just as He told Joshua because in Joshua 5 Jesus Christ actually says
I’m the commander in chief of the armies of the Lord. What does Christ tell Joshua? He tells Joshua? He tells Joshua how to conquer the city; He
gives chokmah, military chokmah to Joshua. See, it was Christ that came up with the idea
of going around the walls, without conquering the city, you just walk around
the walls and I’ll take care of the rest.
So that tactic of strategy was devised by Christ, and He taught it to
Joshua. Now that makes it reasonable to
presuppose that He also came up with a strategy of survival; David, here’s what
you do, play the mad man, and then He probably disappeared, and David said,
play the mad man? What’s He mean, and
the more he thought about it the more it sat, and he went ahead and did it.
But David in verse 7 applies the principle to his army; he says look
men, Jesus Christ got me out of a jam, and as a principle I can tell you what
wherever you’re going to fight in the years to come in my army, you can always
rely on the fact that the angel of the Lord camps, He bivouacs, He’s with us
always. “…with them that fear Him,”
that’s the principle, they have to be believers and using the faith technique.
Verse 8 is an invitation to his army to get experientially oriented to
trusting. “Oh, taste and see that the
LORD is good; blessed is the man who trusts in him.” “taste and see” is a picture of getting to
know, to trust gradually, it’s developing faith. See, David is not under any
illusions, what is the faith, spiritually, of these four hundred guys right at
the moment? They’re all complainers,
they’re oppressed, they’re downhearted, they’re discouraged, what a crew, David
built an army from four hundred of these types.
And he realizes that to help these men get started to rebound, get out
of it, and keep on moving, he’s got to learn to trust gradually. So he uses and idiom that the Jewish mothers
would use on their children and that is that they would take the food and rub
it on the pallet, rub it on the lips, and develop the taste in the baby. This was done, for example in several places
in Proverbs it tells about this. And
from the words we can gather that this is one way in which the mothers
developed taste in their children. I
don’t know whether they ate all their spinach or not but they tried to develop
taste by giving a little bit, not a lot, but just a little bit and the child
would develop a taste for it and then they’d give them a little bit more. It’s gradual.
Well, that gradualness in trusting the Lord is what David invites the
believer in verse 8 to do, “taste and see,” in other words, trust Him in some
area over which you can now, there are some things for which you can’t trust
Him, be honest about it, but there are some things you can trust Him. Trust in
the area where you can, that’s the tasting.
And then seeing is watch Him answer, “taste and see that the Lord is
God.
Verse 9, “Oh, fear the LORD,” verse 9 is another principle that he tells
his men, the word “fear” is to respect, and it is an attitude toward
authority. Now this is something that
David recognizes that you have to have in any group of people, is respect for
authority. And in the Christian life you
have to have respect for Christ’s authority before you can love Him. People do not love the Lord when they become
Christians. It’s impossible; the word
“love” when it is used in Scripture in that context means loyalty, it doesn’t
mean what you think. So new believers
will not love the Lord, they can’t love the Lord until first they respect the
Lord. Now that goes in all areas of
life.
You always have to have respect before you can have love; it always goes
that way. It never goes the other way, I
don’t care how much you argue, if you think it through for a moment you never
love something you don’t respect; you never do that; you always first come to
respect the person and then you come to love them. That holds true whether it’s in an
organization, whether it’s in marriage, whether it’s in the Christian life,
whether it’s in your relationship with the Lord, whatever it is respect
precedes love. This is why in the Ten
Commandments we have one of the commandments to respect parents. Children are not taught in the commandments
to love their parents. They’re taught to
respect them. Why? Because you have to respect them first before
you can love them, and generally no one loves their parents until they’re 25 or
30, in all honesty; you spend 25 years getting the respect of your children and
then along about after you’ve breathed your last they might reciprocate and
love you. Don’t worry about if they don’t
love you, you just worry about your children respect you and the love comes
later.
So he tells his army you don’t love the Lord; these are new people, they
are immature believers, and he doesn’t tell them love the Lord. He tells them “fear the Lord,” respect Him,
“you His saints; for there is no want [lack] to them that respect him.” That’s a promise, there is no want, you’ll
never lack anything if you respect, and that promise is fantastic. Verse 9 completely shoots down all of the
subjective emotionalism of our generation.
Look at verse 9 again, what does it say?
All you need to do is respect Christ, you do not have to love Him in
order to be blessed. It says only those
who respect Him have all their needs supplied.
So don’t have some big fat guilt complex, because someone says do you
love the Lord. You ought to tell them,
no I don’t.
Verse 10, “The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger; but they who
continually seek the LORD shall not want [lack] any good thing.” “The young lions” is always a picture of an
aggressive enemy, it comes over, it’s a Satan symbol actually in Scripture, and
it says “the young lions do lack,” these are the people who do not respect the
authority of the Lord, see, it’s not whether they love or not, it’s whether
they respect His authority or not. “But
they that seek,” habitually, participle, “shall not want any good thing.” Now isn’t that fantastic military
training? That’s how he started his
military training program off, that was his first basics. Spiritual training first, then they deal with
the weapons; they had weapons practice in the cave, couldn’t do it outside, had
to do it inside.
Then in verse 11-22 is an instruction.
The rest of the Psalm, as declarative praise Psalms often do, just
shades off into instruction. And the
gist of the instruction is that David tells his men to avoid evil and seek good
because of the kind of God they serve.
In other words, if they’re to be the army of Jehovah, they must conform
to Jehovah’s character. Verse 11, “Come,
ye children,” now why? David utilizes the third divine institution; in
Scripture, here’s another little point, in Scripture all instruction is always
patterned after the third divine institution.
All instruction, every time in Proverbs you have instruction, what is
it? Father-son; mother-daughter. Always in a family context. Why is that? Because chronologically in your
life where did you first receive your instruction; it was in your family, it
should have been. Most normal people
received instruction in the home in the first place.
This is why we’re developing family training literature, to put tools
back into the hands of the parents and let the parents do it. And no sooner had we begun to work on this
literature than a whole mass of people started saying, well what are you going
to do about the kids who don’t have Christian parents. Child Evangelism and other organizations are
dedicated to that situation. The old
story is that we’ve got to have Sunday School; do you realize that Sunday
School didn’t start until 1860 or 70 and then it wasn’t Sunday School, it was a
reading program, the Methodists in England started it to teach children how to
read so they could read the Bible. Now
what do you suppose the Christians did for 1800 years without Sunday
School? They did what we should be
doing, they did it all in the home. And
the parents came to the services, learned doctrine, and then they taught their
children in the home. And you know what,
that generated tremendous respect because the children would look back all
their life, who was it that taught me the Word of God first, my mother and my
father. And parents who do this will
find it molds the whole image of your children because it molds that
relationship the proper way; you are their authority, you’re the one that teach
your children the word, they don’t have some stranger doing it, you do it and
you reap the fantastic benefits.
Well David applies the same principle even though the relationship is
one between a commander and his soldiers, when he goes to instruct it is like
the father/son relationship. This
carries over into his military experience, “Come, ye children, hearken unto me;
I will teach you the respect of the LORD.”
Now look, that’s about the fourth time we’ve had it in here. Not one thing about loving the Lord, respect
him.
Verse 12, “What man is he who desires life, and loves many days,” you
know who that’s directed to, if you want to survive, that’s what verse 12 is,
what one of you, all you men, four hundred of you, you’re going to be out there
and there are going to be spears, arrows and everything else, if you want to
survive, then listen to what I have to say.
So this is an address to men who are going to face death, gruesome death
in military combat. He says if you want
to survive, get this straight.
Verse 13, “Keep your tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking
treason.” Now why is this? Morale, with those four hundred men all you
have to do is have two or three people out of it inside the cave; two people
out of it, 398 people with it, and pretty soon you’ll wind up with 398 people
out of it and 2 people with it. That’s
the way it always goes, you need just two or three troublemakers who are going
to badmouth David, badmouth the Lord, gripe, complain or do something and there
goes the whole thing. So this is a
warning, first of all to develop unity and watch the morale of the
organization. Don’t ever allow people to
start badmouthing in this situation; you keep your tongue from evil. Now this is the idea of spreading human
viewpoint dissension in the ranks is what it is.
Verse 14, “Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it,”
that’s an instruction that is directed basically toward their mental
attitude. They are to seek peace. Now that sounds like an odd instruction to
soldiers. Why does he instruct soldiers
to seek peace? Because soldiers can
become dehumanized if they don’t handle themselves properly under the
fierceness of combat. Under the
tremendous strain of facing death over and over and over, under the tremendous
strains of watching your friends die and being slaughtered, you can develop a
vengefulness that is not of the Lord, it is a personal vindictiveness, and a
hardened vengeful attitude. And he’s
warning his army against that. Some of
you who have never been in the service and some of you who are against the
military, this may sound very strange to you, but the most effective soldiers
are not the ones who are those with vindictiveness and bitterness; the best
soldiers are the ones who the cool professionals that do their job in skill and
they’re not hotheads that blow it. You
don’t need hotheads when you’re in a military organization; you need people who
are skilled, who are artists with their weapon.
Those are the people you need, you don’t need hotheads. And so this is another admonition to his
soldiers.
Verse 15, “The eyes of the LORD are upon the rightreous, and His ears
are open unto their cry.” This is
assurance to these people, what are they, what does 1 Samuel 22:1-2 say, they
were oppressed, weren’t all those four hundred people the afflicted ones. He says don’t worry about it, God has you in
mind, in other words, God, in verse 15, is omniscient. So verse 15 is teaching
the essence of God, he’s actually going through the essence here, God is love,
and God is omniscient. This is David’s
way of just declaring God’s omniscience.
Verse 16, “The face of the LORD is against those who do evil, to cut off
the remembrance of them from the earth.”
What’s that? God’s justice. Another one of His attributes. And this is assurance to his army that if
they’re always in a just cause the enemy is doomed. Isn’t that simple logic; if you’re always
fighting for a just cause, the enemy has to be doomed. Now it’s a very simple point of strategy
here.
Verse 17, “The righteous cry, and the LORD hears, and delivers them out
of all their troubles,” that is a principlized or generalized statement of
verse 4. See verse 4 was his personal
experience, and now it is generalized into a principle in verse 17, that’s
always how the Hebrew works.
Verse 18, “The Lord is nigh [near] unto those who are of a broken heart,
and saves such as have a contrite spirit.”
This is the inner attitude of his soldiers. The word “broken” is not the word we discussed
in Proverbs, that means a broken, smashed spirit, a spirit that has just been
so beaten down that the person has lost all will to live. Now that’s not what this mean, the “broken
heart” and broken spirit refers to orientation to grace. You see, in human viewpoint man is always
autonomous, that is, he is always striving to push away the revelation of God,
get rid of it. The submissive man
submits and welcomes God’s Word. And so
this attitude of submission is idiomatically portrayed in Scripture as a broken
heart, the idea is that at one time I was autonomous, I was pushing God’s will
away from me in my life and now I’ve switched, I’ve moved around, I’ve done a
one eighty and I’ve been reoriented.
Verse 19, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but the LORD
delivers him out of them all.” How does
David know this, and how would this be credible to his soldiers? It would be credible to his soldiers because
it happened personally to David. No one
of those soldiers would ever be involved in the situation so bad as David. Now look at this principle, it’s going to
apply in a wonderful way to the Lord Jesus Christ. David, as it were, went through hell for his
army; no one of his soldiers will ever have to face the pressure David had to
face down in Gath. And the principle is
if David made it from Gath, I can make it from whatever my situation is.
Now the same principle holds, if David is a type of Christ, what did
Christ have to live through? Every
possible satanic attack that could be tossed his way; Jesus Christ had to face
Satan eyeball to eyeball; Jesus Christ had to take every sin that you have ever
thought, committed or will ever do and He has gone through hell; Jesus Christ
has gone through the worst. You and I
are never asked to go through what Christ went through, and this will change
some of your Christology, some of you understanding of Jesus Christ, because
some people get the idea, oh well, Jesus didn’t have a sin nature, Jesus was
perfect, Jesus had an easy time. He did
not! Jesus Christ had to go through
trial and pressure and things that you will never even think of. The trials that Christ handled on the cross
are unknown, for God blacked it out for three hours so no human being could ever
see what His Son had to endure for those three hours. That was just a blackout. That was God’s grace, because the people,
there were some people who loved Christ, particularly His mother and some of
the ladies that were standing by and it was God’s grace to them so they
wouldn’t have to look and see what Christ was doing in those three hours. So actually the blackout was very gracious,
so God saw their need.
But before that, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ’s pressure was so
great, remember when He prayed in Gethsemane, the sweat come out with
blood. Now that was the kind of
fantastic pressure Christ was under. No
human has ever been asked to do that; no Christian throughout twenty centuries
of church history, facing all the brutality and the martyrdom that has gone on,
no one can ever say I faced a trial Christ didn’t face. No!
Hun-uh! So here’s David, the same
principle, he can cite verses 17, 18 and 19 because he himself has gone through
it.
Verse 20 became prophecy, but here in the Psalm it’s directed to armies
and protection, “He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” This is a protection; it doesn’t mean that
his men aren’t going to die in the future, but it’s a principle that they’re
not going to die by accident. The only
way a man on positive volition is ever going to die in battle is because his
ministry is finished before the Lord and that is the only way he can ever be
destroyed in battle. No man who is a
Christian, who has the doctrine flowing, who is trusting the Lord actively, is
ever going to die in battle by a (quote) “stray bullet” (end quote). Never!
He is going to die because that is the end of his ministry, no accident
for the Christian in battle. And that’s
the principle behind verse 20. “Not one
of his bones shall be broken,” however, the truth of protection applies ideally
to Jesus Christ. And ideally on the
cross what happened? When the Roman
soldiers that checked the people dying on the cross came by they saw Christ had
already died, so the centurion didn’t break His bones. And it literally fulfilled in an ideal form
the general principle given here in verse 20.
It fulfilled another principle because in Exodus 12:46 the Pascal lamb
could not have his bones broken. They
had to have a perfect sacrifice.
Verse 21, again emphasizing for his soldiers, “Evil shall slay the
wicked,” in other words, the law of self-destruction, “and they that hate the
righteous shall be desolate. [22] The LORD redeems the soul of His servants;
and none of them who trust in Him shall be held guilty,” is literally the
translation. It is meaning that they are
out of fellowship and they are going to be disciplined. You see, David knows what discipline is and
he knows what it means to get out of fellowship. He’s got four hundred men plus himself, he’s
got to develop an army. Now he’s going
to have losses, he’s going to have casualties, and as every great military
commander, David is interested in minimizing casualties. He’s not interested in having his men
destroyed and killed and maimed in battle. David cares very much for his men
and Psalm 34 is dedicated to the minimization of loss. And he realizes that the host of the Lord
will [can’t understand word] the loss any time you have the spiritual
principles violated given in this Psalm.
So beginning in verse 11 and as we have seen in verse 22, our survival
manual for his army. Next week we’ll see
the training of his army and another Psalm that he taught them in the