1 Samuel Lesson 37
David Saves Keilah – 23:1-13
Tonight we are moving into another section of the book of 1 Samuel and
to chart exactly where we’ve come and where we’re going, I hope this might help
you visualize the situation. So far this
horizontal line represents the book of 1 Samuel. The first seven chapters was a large group of
material that dealt with how God prepared
I don’t want you to lose the forest for the trees, that’s why I’m going
over this. Every book of Scripture has
an argument to it, and although we have to deal with it verse by verse don’t
forget that in the final analysis, if you really know a book of the Bible you
will know the logic of its argument.
These books were written to make many doctrines clear, and 1 Samuel is a
political document. From chapter 16
through the first chapter of 2 Samuel we have the character of the king, or the
fact that Saul decreases but David increases during this period. You have the first incumbent gradually phased
out and the true incumbent of the office of king increasing during this period
of time. And that whole section deals
more with the character of the king.
Now the character of the king is shown by the way David responds to
situations and adversities that line his way on the path to kingship. And these chapters, in the dark ages of
politics in which we live, this should be for you an inspiration and a
challenge, instead of just throwing up your hands and saying all is lost,
actually the book of Samuel was written to encourage believers and especially
believers aspiring to political office, how to do it. And here you have the political office, you
have the man that God has chosen for that political office, and you have chapter
after chapter after chapter of how that man trains himself under the Holy
Spirit to qualify for that office.
The office of king is a secular office, it is not a sacred office. We’re not talking about a man qualifying for
prophet or priest, or wise man; we are talking about a man qualifying for
secular political office, and the principles we learn from this book apply to
any political office. So instead of
reading or trying to find Christian books on how to do it, and you won’t find
any because very few are written on this subject, God has already preempted the
book market with 1 Samuel and this is a manual of political wisdom. In chapter 8 we had one of the greatest
political speeches ever given in the history of the human race; it was given by
the prophet Samuel in which he outlined the dangers of centralized power. And in these chapters that we are now
studying we have one of the greatest biographies of a politician. And that’s what David is, he is a politician. Jesus Christ is going to fulfill a political
office and to the degree that Christ fulfills that office He is a
politician. The word “politician” has
become so darkened in our minds that when we mention the word it automatically
has a nuance to it that’s adverse. But
that’s false, there is such a thing as godly politicians. They are possible, David was one, Christ is
another, and it is a most honorable and very much unappreciated ministry if God
leads you in that direction. You will be
maligned, criticized, you will have vast numbers of citizens against you, but
you will have the satisfaction that you’re doing God’s will on God’s
terms.
Now this large section, from 1 Samuel 16-2 Samuel 1 can be subdivided
into four sections, dealing with phases of David’s rise to power. The first phase, chapters 16-17, deal with
David’s anointing. This period was when
God, through Samuel, picked out the man for the office. God always picks out the man for the office,
and this is why when we move into a situation involving the selection of
candidates for office, how often have you thought to pray that in the middle of
all these shenanigans that go on, that God in His sovereignty would work it out
that the right man would be in the right office. It is your privilege as a Christian to pray,
it is your obligation as a Christian citizen to pray. If you don’t believe me the command is given
in 1 Timothy 2. So we have the first
part of David; he is chosen, he is anointed, from which we get the word
“Christ.” Here is where the office of
Christ comes in; Christ is not Jesus’ last name, it is His title, not His last
name. There were may christs in history;
Satan in a way was christ at one time, he was Lucifer, he was the anointed
cherub; so at one time Satan could be called Lucifer the christ, and he forsook
the office and therefore became known as Satan.
Now we have the second part, chapters 18-20; the second part of David’s
rise to power is his rejection. That was
the time when Saul tried seven times to assassinate him, and seven times God
graciously delivered David from the hands of Saul. That period of David’s life was a time when
he changed from a hero into an outlaw.
It was at this time in chapter 18 that everybody was cheering, they had
parades in his honor. But by chapter 21
he is going to be hounded by the armies of his own country, he will be a man
without a country. And this is how
fortunes rise and fall in the area of politics.
And then the third part of David’s life, from chapters 21-27, is the
persecution phase, and it is the persecution phase that we are now
studying. It is the persecution phase of
David’s life that corresponds to this era of history, because in this era of
history Jesus Christ, the King, is rising to power. He is not yet seated on the Davidic throne,
but in the unseen world around us, Jesus Christ is conquering. The hymn we sing, Onward Christian Soldiers,
was written by someone who was a postmillennialist, that is, someone who
believed the millennium would come and then Christ would come after, but the
principles of Onward Christian Soldiers apply in the unseen spiritual realm
today. Jesus Christ has been anointed,
that phase was completed with John the Baptist.
The second phase, Christ’s rejection, was completed with his death on
the cross, and the persecution phase started with Jesus Christ on the cross, or
off the cross, resurrected, identified with His followers down through history
until the Second Advent. So we, right
now, share, if we are identified with Christ, the persecution of Christ, just
as David was persecuted in a [can’t understand word] way, Christ, on the way to
His throne is also persecuted in Satan’s world.
This is why so many of these Psalms mean so much to many of why, why so
many of you have been able to attain tremendous help by meditation on the
Psalms. Maybe you never realized why the
Psalms seem to connect, why they plug into your needs. The reason is because they were written in a
historical era that parallels your personal spiritual experience. As believers today we are being persecuted by
the unseen principalities and powers, and to the degree that we are wise, we
are victorious in resisting their persecution.
To the degree that we neglect the Word of God, to the degree that we
play games, to the degree that we don’t care whether we take in the Word or
not, whether we obey it or not, or whether it’s the truth or not, to that
degree we lose, and we are hurt and we are maimed as believers living today.
Now this large persecution phase can in turn be broken down, chapters
21-27. We have completed two of those
chapters, chapters 21-22; in those two chapters we learned how David was
humbled before God by a human viewpoint failure in strategy and he learned a
lesson during these two chapters. David
learned a lesson that you’re going to see him apply again and again and again. David was a tremendous believer because God
didn’t have to teach him the same lesson 2 or 3 times; God taught David a
lesson, sure it was severe, but once David latched on to God’s lesson David
applied them all the time. You’re going
to see David apply this lesson so often that you’ll be able to memorize it
backwards and forwards by the time we are finished. David applies it and applies it and applies
it and applies it.
What was the lesson that he learned in chapters 21-22? The lesson was that you cannot be hasty in
the Christian life, you must always rely on God’s divine guidance, that
hastiness undercuts divine guidance; it always has and always will. And David learned the hard way that when
you’re hasty and you make decisions and you haven’t cleared it with the Lord,
you haven’t had time to meditate in the Word, you haven’t had time to consider
the leading of the Holy Spirit, then you’re in trouble. For example, the Board of a church has to
sense the leading of the Holy Spirit on that local congregation, they can’t go
by how the Holy Spirit is leading some other congregation or how the Holy
Spirit led the present congregation twenty years ago. It is how the Holy Spirit is leading the
congregation today that counts, and that is one of the functions the Board has;
it’s actually the function of every voting member. When you exercise your vote we are trusting
that you have prayed about it, that you have thought about it, that your vote
will reflect your comprehension of how the Holy Spirit leads. The Board has the job of ascertaining the
spiritual leading and not making the mistake that David did. David’s mistake was hastiness and it got him
in serious trouble.
Now tonight we begin the next two chapters, 23-24 and David is going to learn
another lesson on his way to the throne.
David learned other things in chapters 21-22, he learned about
undeserved suffering, and so forth, but now in chapters 23-24 David is going to
learn the treachery of men and the delivering power of God. So the theme for chapters 23-24 is David
experiences the delivering power of God from human treachery. Every leader, no matter who he leads, no
matter what organization he’s in, sooner or later has to learn that people will
knife you in the back. This is human
nature, the fallen human nature to do it.
And you have to just take that as an occupational hazard. One day everybody will be shaking your hand
and saying how great you are, how nice you are, how they appreciate you and
they love you and this and that, and then sooner or later you’ll find that the
very same people that were telling you they love you and shook your hand all
smiles, but they’re busy spreading gossip, maligning and so on behind your
back. And this is the occupational
hazard of a believer in a leadership position.
It is the occupational hazard, actually, of every leader and David has
to learn this and he is going to learn it in these chapters.
The first section of this, the first five verses of 1 Samuel 23, might
be entitled that David saves Keilah, Keila,
with the emphasis and accent on the “i”, and Keilah was a city on the border
near Adullam. Ramah is the place where
Samuel’s seminary was, Nob was the city that was brutally massacred by Saul’s
elite force, and we have
Last time we saw his army he had four hundred of the worst group that
you could imagine, assembled in the cave of Adullam. These were the men who were God’s answer to
Psalm 142; these were the righteous people, these were the people that David
looked forward to, to be the great mature believers and a great mature group of
believers they would one day become as we saw in 2 Samuel 23. Ten of these people, at least, had become
general officers; many others had become high up in David’s military
organization. You might say that this
was one of the greatest classes of cadets that were ever trained in the history
of warfare. They had the ideal
leader. Imagine this, they had the best
military leader next to Jesus Christ train them. In those dark days of living in the caves of
Adullam, when they had very little food to eat, they had tremendous spiritual
food to eat. David taught them Psalm 34,
that was the first unit of their military training, orientation to authority,
to God’s authority. That was their first
lesson in their series of basic training, and later on they trained, of course,
in the techniques of weaponry and so forth. But David’s first military training
lesson was Psalm 34.
Now in verses 1-5, this unit that has been training for some time, is
going to go into battle, and it’s always important that when a new unit goes
into battle they win; just like in athletics except it’s worse if you lose. And it does nothing for moral, and there’s
nothing like it for moral of a new group if after they’ve trained and trained
and trained, the law of hope takes over, and they anticipate blessing as a
result of the hardship of training. You
can endure the toughest kind of training if you’re confident that you’re being
trained correctly, that the training some day is going to pay off, even though
right now it’s tough to take. And so the
training is going to pay off in a tremendous battle, the battle of Keilah, and
David rages the siege of this city. And God is going to protect his army, God
is not going to allow them to go down in defeat, and though these men are not
as well trained as they one day will be, although David does not have all the
leaders that he needs, God is very graciously going to allow them to slaughter
the enemy, to kill them, and this will be used by the Holy Spirit to give them
confidence.
It’s like us in the Christian battle; the greatest thing that can help
you in your Christian maturity is to win
a few, to take Romans 8:28 and 1 Peter 5:7 and some of the other great promises
of the Word of God, and then face something in your family, something in your
personal life, something in your business, and be able, after having learned
the doctrine, to say well, I won that one, not in the sense of bragging about
it but in the sense of being grateful that the Holy Spirit gave you a victory,
that you can look back and say well by golly, I did it here and that means that
I can do it again and again and again and again; God’s promises work! So that’s the big lesson in these five
verses.
Verse 1, “Then they told David,” remember David is in the wilderness
with his army, he has between four and six hundred men now in his unit. “Then they told David, saying, Behold, the
Philistines fight against Keilah, and they rob the threshing floors.” Now the theme for this passage of Scripture
is the word “tell.” Often times, and
this is a hint to you and you can do this in the English Bible by the way, when
you study a passage of Scripture notice words that are repeated over and over
again. One of the words here is the word
“to tell,” negad, and negad means to report, and in the
context of this chapter it refers to intelligence, military intelligence. Now I point this out because it’s going to
come up about ten times before we finish and you want to grasp the significance
of military intelligence, because if you do you’ll understand something about
divine guidance. What was the lesson
David just got through learning after two chapters? Don’t be hasty, get your facts straight and
stick to divine guidance; make sure that what you are doing is God’s will. So David has learned that lesson and he is
going to apply it over and over again.
Now before an army can do anything they need intelligence. For those of you who are not familiar with
the parlance, this doesn’t refer to IQ; the intelligence when used the way we
are using it tonight does not refer to ability to think; military intelligence
refers to information gained usually by espionage or spies. That is what we mean by military intelligence
and every army of history that has ever been victorious has always had to have
an excellent system of espionage. Some
of it is very dirty work. It involves
lying, cheating, killing, bribing, and sometimes Christians are called to do
this and it’s very hard for believers to engage in this kind of activity but it
is very necessary for the health of the country to engage in being an
undercover agent, to lie, to cheat, to murder when called upon to do so, and so
forth. This is all part of living in a
fallen world and being an espionage apparatus for a government. And if we do not have espionage then we are
in very, very serious shape.
Now one of the great lessons in the superiority of intelligence was
shown in the Six Day War. Israel had
fantastic intelligence. One fellow who
was over in Israel at the time was telling me that when the Israeli aircraft
flew out over the Mediterranean the Egyptian anti aircraft batteries were all
pointing east, and they had some airstrips and all their fighter planes were on
these air strips in back of this barrier of antiaircraft fire; it was all
pointing east. Now the Jewish
intelligence reported that they were all going east, so they took their planes
off, Jordan had radar that was watching Israeli air space, and so they were
confident, they thought, that if the Israeli aircraft took off they would be on
the Jordanian radar, but again, Jewish intelligence knew the height, the range
and the scope of the Jordanian radar, and they mapped out exit routes; so their
aircraft flew at low altitudes, all the way west, came in and flew this way,
and this is how they secured about 30% of the Egyptian Air Force in about 20
minutes on the first day of battle. Not
only did they have the exact route flying west over the Mediterranean picked
out perfectly to avoid the Jordanian radar, but they also had another thing. The Egyptian Air Force had on the runways dummy
air craft that from the air looked exactly like the real ones, and it was a
hedge in case their air defense system missed and the Israeli planes came in
they would bomb these dummy aircraft, and these planners of the Israeli attack
had to work out some system because their planes only had a certain number of
minutes over the target; most of them only had one pass over the target because
this is a long flight, they don’t have much fuel. So whatever they did had to be done to the
split second.
So what they did, they hit upon a neat scheme, coming in from the west
at very low altitudes, so low that the Egyptian radar wouldn’t see them, then
they timed a certain ascent point, and figured out how far this ascent point
from the target, from the aircraft on the runway of these airstrips. They figured out fast it would be to cover
that distance, and when they reached the ascent point all the Israeli planes
started climbing and this immediately put them in sight, deliberately, of the
Arab radar. Since their spies had been
in Egypt with their stop watches, timing how fast it took the Arabs to get off
the runways, they had it all worked out so that by the time the Hebrew planes
got over the target point the Egyptian pilots would be starting to fly the real
planes, not the dummies, and the real planes would be just moving down the
runway, and the dummies, of course, would be sitting there. And that’s how, when the Israeli planes came
over they knew the dummy planes from the real ones. The real ones were moving. To show you how perfect the timing was, they
only had a few seconds because if they allowed the Egyptian aircraft to get off
they’d have opposition. So it had to be
fast enough to get over and bomb the planes while they were still taking off,
but it had to be slow enough to give the Egyptian pilots time enough to get in
their planes and get them moving. And
you can imagine the timing and calculations that were involved. All of that could never have been done if
Israeli intelligence had not had many, many operatives watching and observing
and timing all the Arab installations.
The Jews today have one of the greatest international espionage agencies
that is going.
Now David has an intelligence system.
“They told David” refers to David’s intelligence system, but David has
an advantage at this point and this is why I’ve tried to lead you up to the
blessings that God has given David.
David’s intelligence system was stolen from Saul, and it consists of one
priest and one prophet, and we’ll say this, many patrols. He has many patrols out but the main areas
for his intelligence network have been stolen from Saul. Saul has many more patrols than David; from
the human point of view Saul has a better intelligence system than David,
except it is missing at two critical points; it doesn’t have contact with God
who is omniscient. And therefore David
outdoes anything that Saul had.
But I cite this to you to show you something else. When God works in
history He works through normal channels. David is not going to miraculously
win the battle. How is David going to
win the battle? He is going to win the
battle like any good military commander is going to win the battle, by his own
wisdom. The miraculousness of God comes
in provisions at the right time for normal human endeavor. David is going to have to plan his military
activities with military intelligence.
He’s got to get the intelligence, and God is going to supply it to him,
but God doesn’t do the fighting for him.
David does the fighting; God gives him the provisions but God lets David
do the fighting and that’s just like you and just like me. God gives us the promises, God gives us the
resources but God doesn’t live your life for you. And so don’t go around saying oh, Christ is
going to live my life for me. He is
not. He is going to provide power for
you to live but it is you that is going to do the deciding and you that is
going to decide which patterns did you learn, which patterns you reject. That’s your job, not Christ’s.
So the report comes in, and it’s a fast report. Now how do we know that this was an excellent
kind of intelligence system? By the tense of the verb. In verse 1 when they say, “Behold, the
Philistines fight against Keilah,” it’s talking about a raid, and it didn’t
take the Philistines long, this probably would take just about a day. David is over here in the wilderness of
Judea, Keilah is over here on the western border. When the spies come back,
they say, participle, “the Philistines right now are fighting against Keilah,
and they are right now,” participle, “robbing the threshing floors.” So the spy network operates very
rapidly. Before the Philistines finish
their raid David knows about it; David knows about the raid while it’s already
in progress.
Now why are they attacking the threshing floors? I little bit of culture; the Philistines were
a warrior race, they were people who did not concentrate on agriculture, they
concentrated on stealing other people’s agricultural products and they would
wait until the harvest time, they would not do it when the grain was in the
field, that would mean they’d have to do the harvesting, they didn’t like that,
they let their enemies do all that. So they’d let the poor enemies, their
neighbors, harvest all the grain and in that day instead of machinery they had
threshing floors. And it was a long,
prolonged process which made the Jewish farmer very vulnerable to enemy attack,
for two reasons. Number one, all the
young men were involved in the harvesting procedure, so for a while you had all
your reserves, all your militia, taken up with doing the harvest, getting the
harvest in. So you have very few
able-bodied men to fight. That’s the first weakness.
The second weakness was that you had all this grain out there that you
couldn’t defend and it was easily transportable. So the Philistines had their spy system
working, and they found out, listen, we need some food for the winter, and it’s
harvest time, let’s go up to Keilah and steal it. And so they said okay, let’s wait till they
get most of it harvested and when they get it all piled up, before they
distribute it to the people we’ll go up there and take it. So the Philistine column moves up from the
southwest, with animals, and this is going to be their undoing. They come up with their own “trucks” which in
that day were four-legged trucks, to haul this grain away. And that’s what’s happening here in verse 1.
Verse 2, “Therefore” David applies the lesson he learned, “David
inquired of the LORD, saying, Shall I go and smite these Philistines?” Now notice how he refers to Philistines, the
same way he referred to Goliath, this clod, this uncircumcised Philistine. Remember how David sarcastically referred to
Goliath this way. Here again he’s doing
the same thing. “These Philistines”
should convey to you why he hates them.
David does not hold personal animosity against the Philistines as such,
he is against the Philistines because the Philistines are against his God; they
are God’s enemies and therefore they are David’s enemies, this is holy
war. So “these Philistines” is a
derogatory term that refers to any one who opposes the authority of God, David
hates.
And so he “inquired of the LORD,” this means he went to a prophet,
probably Gad at this point, and he goes to Gad and he asks of him, “Shall I
go?” Now why do you suppose he was so
anxious to ask the Lord? Because the
last time he went he got a whole city wiped out because he went too fast, so
this time guess what, David has learned something, and he’s saying now listen
Lord, last time you clobbered me because I got out of line, so this time I am
going to say “do I have Your permission.”
And so David seeks out God’s permission, and then he moves. And God said,
“God and smite the Philistines, and save Keilah.” Please notice, is there any pacifist present,
this is an order from God to kill them.
The word “smite” doesn’t mean tap them on the shoulder, it means to hit
them with a sword so you part their limbs, that’s what smite means. It means to kill. So God tells him go ahead, kill them.
“…and save Keilah,” now the word “save” is another key word for this
passage, it’s the word yasha‘, which
by the way is from Joshua, we get Jesus from it. yasha‘
is always the word that is a technical reserved to God’s supernatural salvation. “Go and yasha‘
Keilah,” save them. Now who was supposed
to save Keilah. Think for a moment, who
was the king on the throne that was supposed to be doing this? Saul, but Saul is in compound carnality and
he’s not doing what he is supposed to do and therefore David is left doing what
Saul is supposed to do. David shouldn’t
have to save Keilah, Saul should be saving Keilah. After all, Saul has over a
thousand men; we’re going to see Saul has so many men he can blanket the whole
area. He’s going to chase down his
personal enemy, why can’t he hit God’s enemies.
All David has is four hundred men; Saul has at least ten times as many
men as David. Why doesn’t Saul save
Keilah? Because like every believer who
is in compound carnality they are not doing what God called them to do; they’re
miserable people, they are always out of fellowship because they’re not
handling the situation, and they’re always bitter toward somebody who is doing
the job. So we have Saul sitting around
while David is saving Keilah.
Verse 3, now remember it’s a new unit, and David has ascertained that he
should go and fight, but in verse 3 has a problem, “And David’s men said unto
him, Behold, we are afraid here in Judah; how much more, then, if we come to
Keilah against the armies of the Philistines?”
And they were the worst armies to fight with. So when we read in verse 3 that “we are
afraid,” it’s a participle, we are always afraid. They were afraid ever since they left
Adullam. As long as they were in Adullam
they felt safe. But that is why the
prophet, Gad, told them get out of Adullam, you get out here where you’re
threatened a little bit. Why do you
suppose? What had David taught
them? Psalm 34. Why do you suppose the prophet said now you
get out of those caves and you get out there where they can shoot at you? Do you know why? Because he wanted them to start applying
Psalm 34; it was a little advanced training for what’s coming up at Keilah. So all this time, they left Adullam, they
were wandering around in the wilderness, and while they’re wandering around
they’re supposed to be learning how to appropriate Psalm 34.
Now to refresh your mind go back to Psalm 34 to see what it was they
were supposed to be learning. The
central section of this Psalm, verses 4-10, this had a lot of promises. David reminds them in verses 4-6 of his
personal experience with God’s salvation.
And then he applies it in principles, verses 7-10, “The angel of the
LORD,” participle, “constantly encamped round about them who respect His
authority, and He delivers them,” imperfect tense, continually, over and over
and over and over and over again. That
was the first great promise that David had been saying, over and over, while
they were wandering around the Judean wilderness, David was saying “The angel
of the LORD encamps around about them that fear Him,” “The angel of the LORD
encamps around about them that fear Him,” “The angel of the LORD encamps around
about them that fear Him,” “The angel of the LORD encamps around about them that
fear Him,” and the guys say oh yeah David, we’ve heard that ten times, don’t
repeat, don’t you know it’s not good oratory to repeat; we heard that once, you
made your point. So David, like a good
man, refused to heed the criticism and moved on and repeated some more.
Verse 8, “Oh taste and see that the LORD is good;” and this is an urging
for them to start applying the promises now, while you’re wandering in Judah,
so the first time we get in battle won’t be the first time you’ve applied the
promise. You men start applying them
no. Verse 9, “Oh, fear the LORD, you His
saints,” this is addressed to the Adullam group, “for there is no want,” no
lack “to them that respect His authority.”
You guys will never lack anything, David kept telling them, if you will
respect the Lord’s authority, and the sign that you respect the Lord is that
you respect His Word. And how do you
express your respect for God’s Word.
Believe it, believing God’s Word is your expression of our respect for
God’s character. Every time we refuse to
obey or to submit or to trust in the promise of the Lord it’s saying that I do
not respect Your character, You are not the kind of God that will back up Your
word. It’s an insult to God. And verse 10 was especially designed for this
group, “The young lions,” which is a Hebrew idiom for the warriors, “the
warriors do lack and suffer hunger; but they that seek the LORD shall not want
any good thing.”
Now these men had been drilled in verse 7, 8, 9 and 10 over and
over. Well, you see what happened in
verse 3 of 1 Samuel 23. All this time
when David was trying to drill Psalm 34 into them, what was happening? They were still afraid. I want you to see this, these believers
screwed up, and yet God used them to secure victory. So because you and I screw up, don’t worry
about it, just try not to screw up so often, that’s all. But these people were
normal fallen creatures, and they goofed it and they didn’t trust the Word;
look, they admit it here, “we are afraid here in Judah,” now in Adullam. See, because God took them out of a natural
fortification. This is one of the things
God will do to you; if you’re in some Adullam some place where you think you’ve
got a rock of shelter around you and you’re going to rely on that instead of
relying on the Lord, the Lord will say un-huh, you come out of there. Sometimes it can be very disastrous,
especially if you’ve put all your faith in the rocks to keep down the enemies
from you, and God calls you, come on out where we can shoot at you. So now you have to trust Me. So he got them out and this training worked a
little bit but it didn’t work very well because even here they admit, and now
they’re afraid to go into battle, and this is normal, the first time into
combat it’s a very traumatic experience to say the least, so these men are
afraid.
So verse 4, David realizes this, he’s very sensitive to his men. And now David goes back to the Lord again;
you see how he so learned that lesson in chapters 21-22. He got burned once through hastiness so now
he says just a minute, I’m going to go back and check this over with the Lord
again to make sure we’re really straight.
“Then David inquired of the LORD yet again. And the LORD answered him and said, Arise, go
down to Keilah; for I will deliver
the Philistines into thine hand,” and the Lord gives him an extra promise here
because the verb to deliver is a participle, it’s a present participle, and it
means “I am in the process of delivering the Philistines into your hands.” In other words, this is a way of conveying
perfect confidence. God says look David,
your unit isn’t well trained, I know that.
These men haven’t had experience in combat; these men have had very
little experience in applying Psalm 34, I know all that, but I also realize
that there’s a job to be done because clodhopper on the throne is still sitting
there fuming instead of his job, the people in Keilah I love and I want them
saved, and buddy, you’re the one that’s going to do it; regardless of whether
you’re trained or not, in this case you’re going to do it, but don’t worry
David, because I am going to be there and I am going to deliver these people
into your hand.
So verse 5, “So David and his men went to Keilah, and fought with the
Philistines, and brought away their cattle,” now that shows you the maneuver
that they did. I said when the
Philistine armies came up to Keilah they brought their trucks with them to
carry off the grain. Now it just so
happened as a smart soldier David realized, ah, that’s exactly where they are
weakest…[tape turns] … “and smote them with a great slaughter. So David saved the inhabitants of Keilah,”
see the verb repeated, David did the king’s job. I want you to remember that because next week
we’re going to see one of the most beautiful Psalms in God’s Word and at the
end of that Psalm there’s going to be a mention that David is king, already,
when he’s not king, because now he is functioning as the king. He is actually replacing Saul in the
experience of the nation.
Now verse 6 begins a new section.
That was the battle at Keilah, now we’re going to encounter the
betrayal. In verses 6-18 we have the
first betrayal and the first deliverance.
David is going to be betrayed three times, and God is going to get him
out of the fire three times. But David
has to encounter this because David has got to learn that God’s power is
sufficient to handle human treachery.
Now you may believe that God’s power is sufficient to handle many
problems in life; God may be sufficient to put bread on your table, God may be
sufficient to take care of your finances, God may be sufficient to do many,
many different things, but one thing many believers, especially leaders, have
trouble in is believing that God is sufficient to handle human treachery and
betrayal. So David will now learn this
lesson.
Verse 6, this is a parenthetical verse, put in here to explain something
to the reader; actually the passage begins in verse 7, but verse 6 is an
explanatory note. “And it came to pass,
when Abiathar, the son of Ahimelech, fled to David at Keilah, that he came down
with an ephod in his hand.” Now this
sets you up for the fact that David needs military intelligence. Gad was left back in the Judean wilderness
and he’s without intelligence or contact with God except the ephod. Now the ephod looks something like an
undershirt, very undramatically put, but that’s the way it looks. And it was the ephod that the priest used,
the Urim and the Thummim on his chest, and in some way this ephod would give a
yes or no answer to a question that you posed to it. It was the way that the Lord had of directing
the nation through the high priest. It
was not like a prophet; a prophet would give a propositional sentence; the
ephod would not do that, the ephod would only say yes or no, it wasn’t as clear
communication as a prophet but verse 6 tells us that the one priest that was
leftover from Saul’s slaughter of Nob is the one man who is going to totally
undo Saul.
See how beautifully the Lord works. Saul wanted to stamp out the
priests; as a result Saul lost the priesthood, and as a result… you know Saul
could have used this ephod, Saul had the authority as the king sitting on the
throne to go to the priest and say look, is David in the city, where is
he? And he could have gotten an answer. But what God did is He removed the ephod
physically out of Saul’s domain and gave it to David. That’s why I stressed at
the end of chapter 22 the blessings that accrued to David, he had the
priesthood and the prophets on his side, now he’s going to use them.
Verse 7, “And it was told,” there’s the verb negad, there’s Saul’s intelligence system working, “And it was told
Saul that David was come to Keilah. And Saul said, God has delivered him into
mind hand; for he is shut in, by entering into a town that has gates and
bars.” Now that requires some
explanation. So let’s pause for a minute
to understand the situation so we can then understand the victory that God is
going to give and also understand the treachery that is going to come to
David. First, the verb, “God has
delivered him,” this verb, and this is just a little footnote on the side here
for those of you who are going to be taking a religious course or something,
where you’ll be taught everything but the orthodox view of Scripture, nachar is
a verb that refers to selling; nachar was a verb that was not understood. The King James translators guessed at it,
they didn’t know how to translate the verb in this chapter.
This verb was not known, so the critics jumped all over this, and one of
the greatest critics of the Bible, S. R. Driver, whose work is still used in
college classrooms, said this verb doesn’t exist, it is scarcely suitable to
the context. In other words, we don’t
know what it is, it’s just something there, it’s just an enigma. And so ha-ha, we have a polluted text; the
text is wrong, the text is corrupt at this point. But in 1928 a Syrian peasant was plowing in a
field, right near the shore of the Mediterranean, and his plow struck what he
thought was a rock; he began to look at what this apparent rock was and he
discovered it was tablets with a queer form of writing on them. And since 1929 many, many digs have been done
at a place called Ugarit, and out of that has come Ugaritic, which is a
language very similar to Hebrew, except it’s written in cuneiform, and this
language has aided immensely in translating the Old Testament because guess
what, nachar occurs here; this is the
language of the Canaanites that lived alongside David and they spoke the same
language. And so lo and behold, when we
look at the lexicography, we look at some of the vocabulary tablets in
Ugaritic, we find nachar and it means
to sell, just exactly what the context called for.
So you see again a lesson, the liberals and higher critics of the Bible
always jump at some point of silence. If
we don’t have adequate information, don’t panic. I cite this illustration as one that twenty
or thirty years ago people would have said oh, gee, the liberals might have a
point here, all because we didn’t have all the facts. But now the facts are in, we see the Bible is
right, just the way God the Holy Spirit has left it in history.
So the verb means “God has sold him into my hand,” notice how pious Saul
can sound. Isn’t that great, God has
allowed him into my hand, that sounds really sweet, and he’s in compound
carnality and he could care less what God’s doing. Did he care what God was doing? He’d have cared for the poor people of Keilah
when the Philistines were battling. Saul
didn’t care a damn for the people at Keilah, all he cared for was David. You see, he’s got an obsession, this is the
mark of a person in compound carnality.
They never see the plan of God for their life, they are always involved
in some campaign of vindictiveness, bitterness or getting back at somebody.
That’s always the case. And here you see
it in operation.
So Saul says God has shut him in, “for he is shut in, by entering into a
town that has gates and bars.” Now why
does Saul make that point? It goes back…
the best way to illustrate this probably is to go back to one of the most
famous and skillful generals of our generation, General Giap, the commander of
the North Vietnamese forces, he’s a man who never attended a military college
in his life, and yet a man who has attained victory over the most powerful
armies in the world and some of the best educated military men of the
world. Who is this strange character,
General Giap. Originally he was a
political science major, he was a student, he was a scholar who in the 1920’s
wrote pamphlets along with Ho Chi Minh.
He never went to any military staff college, and later on when Ho Chi
Minh began to get in control he put this fellow in charge of the military. Now General Giap didn’t go to college and he
had to learn the hard way.
And in 1950 after World War II the French tried to regain control of
Indo-China because the Japanese had taken it over, France had been clobbered in
World War II so they wanted to reassert their colonial authority. And they assigned an army to Indo-China and began
to flush out the communists under Ho Chi Minh.
In this series of incidents in 1960 Giap lost three major battles and
lost 20,000 men, nearly wiped himself out and the whole communist army with
him. But, Giap was a smart one, he went back to the drawing boards and said
what went wrong, how can I improve. He
wasn’t too proud to learn and Giap studied and studied and studied and finally
the next year, in 1951 along the Black River, he had his revenge on the French. The French had a garrison there, and they
were actually on an offensive mission to clean out the area that was under
communist control. Giap learned one
lesson from the 1950 episode, don’t mass your men together because the French
aircraft will bomb them. So he kept all
his units dispersed. The next tactic he
began to employ was to hit the French at isolated posts. The French main unit would be here and they’d
have isolated areas out here. So what
Giap would do, his army was not as big as the French but it was bigger than
these isolated areas, so he’d clean this one out, then he’d run around and hit
this one, then hit this one, then hit this one; never hit the main force, just
hit the isolated areas.
And then when the French would counter attack and go out after him he
would instruct his force, just disperse, don’t take them on, just melt
away. And so the French when they
counter attacked would never find them, and then the counter attack would come
back in the camp and he’d come back following them, and he’d reassemble and
start cutting off supply lines and everything.
That’s how in 1951 he began to learn and then in 1953 Giap applied all
of his knowledge and ended the French menace because in 1953 a man by the name
of General Henry Navarre took over Command of the French and he had the idea
that what the French had to do was build a set of fortified camps, and then
what you do is you control territory with forays out from these camps. And one of these camps, Dien Bien Phu, was one of these strong points; there
were 5000 French soldiers at this strongpoint; Giap massed 40,000 against it;
see the principle, always outnumber your enemy in the place where you’re
wanting to fight. You don’t have to
outnumber him totally, just at the place where you’re fighting outnumber
him. And he amassed 40,000 men against
the French. The French intelligence
system did not have any idea of how many men Giap had out in the woods; nor did
the French have any idea how many artillery pieces that Giap had. But here’s what happened. The soil around Dien
Bien Phu was very soft, and the French never built any concrete or steel
bunkers, they had no protection. And all
the time that they were camped there, because their intelligence was slack,
they never bothered to strengthen the camp.
And then in March 13, 1954 Giap opened the day with a greeting to the
French with artillery. And that
artillery kept on pounding them and pounding them and pounding them until May
8, 1954, when Dien Bien Phu fell and the French were
kicked out of Indo-China. And during
that time he isolated and strangled Dien Bien Phu slowly setting them in, until
at one point the French, what was left of the French garrison was confined to
less than one square mile of land area.
You can imagine what a target that would be and he just pounded them and
pounded them, pushed them in, pack them in, pound them some more, and he did it
very, very slow.
It’s a modern illustration of what happens when an
outfit gets walled up in a town where there’s bars and doors, and there’s no
escape; once you’re in a defensive position like this you either hold on or you
die. Now David, in verse 7, is in such a
situation. Saul sees the opportunity to make
siege at Keilah, and at this one fell swoop can encompass all of Saul’s men,
he’s got them trapped. [8, “And Saul called all the people together to war, to
go down to Keilah, to besiege David and his men.”]
Now verse 9, “David knew that Saul was secretly
practicing mischief against him;” that’s a sweet way of saying he was fabricating
a military plan is what he was doing, and it’s a participle meaning he is doing
it at this moment. Now it may be that
Jonathan was one of the counter spies for David, but David from this point must
have had spies inside Saul’s camp because Saul has not made a move yet; his
armies are still around Nob. Saul has
not deployed his soldiers down to Keilah yet, it’s just in the planning
stages. And even as Saul plans the raid
on Keilah, David’s spies know it. So
just because God is aiding David, I want you to see that it doesn’t excuse
David’s responsibility. All right, David
learned this military plan against him, “and he said to Abiathar, the priest,
Bring here the ephod.” See, that’s why
verse 6 was put in there to prepare you for what’s going to happen. Now David consults his super intelligence
system, God’s omniscience. See him
applying the lesson he learned in chapters 21-22, he’s going to check in with
the chief first to find out what to do before he does it.
And he asked two questions of God, remember the ephod
would not give you an answer, it would only give you a yes/no, so you had to be
smart enough to ask the ephod the right questions. Verse 10, “Then said David, O LORD God of
Israel, thy servant has certainly heard that Saul is seeking,” participle,
right this moment, “to come to Keilah, to destroy the city because of me [for
my sake].” Now by the way, what was just
on David’s mind? That he’d caused the slaughter
of Nob, so the first thing, he knows what Saul’s going to do. And that’s on his mind, and he asks God two
things. Verse 11, “Will the men of
Keilah deliver me up into his hand?” and second question, “Will Saul come down,
as thy servant has heard?” Now the two
questions are going to decide his strategy.
See, David’s got to devise a strategy here, he’s at
Keilah, he has three choices. To hold, he can hold there; the reason why he’s
holding there, Josephus tells us this in extra-Biblical reports, is that David
not only defeated the Philistines once, but he occupied Keilah to keep the
Philistines from coming up there while these people harvested. See the grace of the man; he’s committing a
force of four hundred men to the city so the young men of the city can get
their harvesting done, and David’s men will stand guard while they’re
harvesting. So David’s been there for
some time by the time this thing occurs.
Now he can hold in Keilah, but that only makes sense if Saul isn’t going
to come down; if Saul comes down that’s militarily a foolish thing do because
he was outnumbered ten to one. Secondly,
he can add the men of Keilah to his army to fight Saul. Or the third thing he can flee. We could more tactfully say “strategic
withdrawal.” But those are the three
options that David faces.
Now what does he doe? Specifically he petitions the
Lord for specific answers, and the two answers to the questions are going to
decide which of these three options he can go on. The first question is actually the second
one, “Will Saul come down as thy servant has heard? Why does he have to know that? Because if Saul is come down he can eliminate
the first option right away, just cross that off the list, that’s foolish. And so he says, “O LORD God of Israel, I
beseech thee, tell thy servant. And the
Lord said, He will come down.” That’s
one answer, it was a yes answer, Saul will come down? Yes, the ephod said. All right, so that eliminates this.
Now David has to have a second question, verse 12,
“Will the men of Keilah deliver me and my men into the hand of Saul?” Now David, by this time knows how important
it is to have a small group of loyal men instead of a large group of people you
can’t trust, or people that will knife you in the back, or people who will
betray you. He’s not interested in
having that group on the team. And at
this point he petitions them about the stability of the men of Keilah. And the answer comes back from the Lord in
verse 12, “And the LORD said, They will deliver thee up.” In other words, David, you will be betrayed,
don’t trust these people, yesterday they sang your praises. In extra-Biblical materials we have how these
people said oh David, David, David, we love you, we love you, we love you. And all the great parades, probably the
Chamber of Commerce gave him the key to the city or something, some rewards or
something because he saved them. And
everybody was praising David, oh David, you’re wonderful, you’re marvelous
David. And what were they going to do? Just as soon as the heat got on they’d betray
David; an unstable group of people, they’re betrayers and David isn’t going to
be stuck with a group of traitors in his outfit.
And so he leaves and in verse 13, “Then David and his
men, who were about six hundred,” you notice he’s recruited two hundred more,
“departed out of Keilah, and went whithersoever the could go.” He’s in full-fledged retreat. Why?
Because he doesn’t want a Dien Bien Phu; he’s not going to get stuck
behind some strategic thing and get isolated and surrounded; that’s ridiculous.
And I want you to see David used his head, David did not have the Lord lead his
army for him. David led the army for the
Lord. And next week we’re going to see
how it happens out in the wilderness, how David is going to meditate, is going
to go to the Lord about this betrayal and how God is going to very, very
wonderfully deliver him.
As we come to this, remember David’s life is a picture
of Jesus Christ. David, you might say,
out of this passage is the betrayed savior of Keilah; Jesus Christ was
betrayed; many believers betrayed Christ. Do you know how we know that? Because when Jesus Christ was crucified where
were all the people of Palm Sunday? Same
old thing, fickle crowd, today we’re all for you, O Jesus, Jesus, we love you
so; they even had “I love Jesus” on their bumper stickers on Palm Sunday, and
what did it mean? Three days later,
murder Him; it doesn’t mean a thing because these people were unstable people.
Today they love Jesus, tomorrow we kill Him, it doesn’t make any difference,
it’s just how we feel about it. And it’s
the same thing with David’s life. So
we’ll learn a little bit about the life of our Lord by looking at the life of
this one who is His type.