Foolish David

There is a saying about not knowing the letter giyeok even with a sickle laid in front of you. It means that if you do not know the Korean alphabet at all, you will not recognize the letter even when someone tells you that a sickle is shaped like it. Such a person has no choice but to learn the alphabet step by step from the beginning. But people with strong pride and self-righteousness do the foolish thing: they do not really know, yet their pride keeps them from learning. If they said plainly that they did not know and asked to be taught, they could gain far more, and still they will not humbly learn. A lack of worldly knowledge only gets you called ignorant, but spiritual ignorance leads to the second death. So we must lay aside our pride and stubbornness and learn what we do not know; only then can we reach salvation. God has brought many people and events into people’s lives so that through life they can discover him, and he has helped them find the answer. But people have no interest in God’s heart and care only about the world. That is why, every time they meet a problem, they fail to grasp what God intends and cannot find the right answer.

How foolish do you think a human being can become? People who are foolish in worldly terms show it by their actions, so you can tell right away. But people who are spiritually foolish seem to have no particular problem by worldly standards, so they are not easy to spot. That is why we can judge rightly only when we are spiritually sensitive.

When I counsel wise people, they obey whatever I tell them, because they believe that God is almighty. On the other hand, I see those who believe their own thinking is right grow cold, to a degree that is painful to watch. It is a very sad thing, for they are missing their own chance to grow spiritually. Those who are spiritually mature see by faith what is unseen, while those who are spiritually young have a faith that will believe only after seeing. So it is never easy to persuade them by telling them in advance about what cannot be seen. I tell you this all the time: Satan does not want you to grow in spirit or in body. That is why you must not forget that Satan is always getting in the way.

What I have felt in my life of faith is this. Once you have grown to a certain point, God throws you a small problem in order to give you a greater blessing. Depending on how you apply that problem to your life, it can become a crisis, or you can receive overflowing blessing. When a jar is filled with water right to the brim, a single drop more makes it overflow. In the same way, God gives you problems because he wants to give you overflowing blessing, but because we do not know his deep purpose, we complain or stumble. Rather than complaining, raging, or despairing, it is wise to pray for the strength to bear it.

But keep this in mind: when God blesses you, Satan moves too. Of course, there are also times when God rebukes through suffering, and that is when the water of faith in the jar is running low. When the water of faith runs low, Satan gets busier. He turns people’s attention to the world, keeps them busy, and stirs up their temper so that they spill the faith in the jar. So, far from being blessed, people who cannot persevere spend their whole lives in the futile labor of spilling the water of faith and filling the jar again.

When Satan tempts them, believers at first feel guilty and resolve not to go the way of the world. But as the temptation grows stronger, their hearts become branded as with a hot iron, and in the end they will be taken captive by the greed Satan has given them, of their own accord. It hurts me more than I can say to see this. They give in to Satan, thinking that they too cannot be free of the world, because everyone in the world lives that way, or because that is how the world works.

Who is God to you? Is God, who created heaven and earth, one who has nothing to do for you as you compete with the world? People seem to see God as a god whose only job is to help their business, help their children do well at school, and help them live well. When hard times come and their children do not turn out as they wanted, they abandon God, as if God had failed to carry out his mission. God cannot do anything for such a person.

If your faith is much the same color as the world, I hope you will quickly pour out that dirty water before God breaks the jar. Only then can you receive blessings that never run dry. I hope you will not compromise between God and the world. If you have experienced God’s grace and still keep wavering between God and the world, Satan will keep testing you, and because God cannot give grace to such faith, you will grow spiritually parched.

God was telling David everything, leading him and protecting him, and yet David could not let go of his own ideas, and so he was acting foolishly. God had told him not to leave Judah, yet he fled from Saul to Achish, the Philistine king, and lived comfortably under his protection. To stay in the land of the Philistines, he bowed and scraped before King Achish and even told lies to keep himself alive. The three thousand people probably thanked David for listening to them, and praised him as loving and wise. This is exactly what a person who compromises between God and the world looks like.

Someone will ask whether David was not wise to save those people’s lives. Would it have been right, they will say, to stay in Israel and get many people killed? By the world’s standards, it will seem right to act as David did. But David was a man of faith who had lived by God’s commands, a man who knew that life is in God’s hands. If that David had entrusted his own life and the lives of his people to God, God would have given not only David but all three thousand people a more peaceful life. So in God’s eyes David’s judgment was a dead decision. Having abandoned the truth, David was already wrapped in darkness, so he had no insight with which to judge wisely.

When David relied on God alone, what he did may have looked reckless, but it was the faith that ran toward Goliath, the faith that would flee rather than take revenge on his enemy himself. Yet this same David lost his judgment when he looked at the number: three thousand people. This unbelief ended up putting David and his soldiers in a position where they would have to go to war against Israel. If David had stayed in Judah with the faith to entrust everything to God, none of this would have happened in the first place. He listened to people rather than to God and tried to please them, and that ended in the sad reality of having to stand against his own people.

When King Achish said he would take David with him into the war against Israel, the Philistine commanders and princes were displeased with David. Their thinking was that if David went out to battle with them, he might side with Israel and attack them instead, so they could not trust him. Hearing what the Philistine commanders said, I thought that their saying it at all was God’s amazing grace. Suppose they had said instead that David was so able that Saul had slain his thousands and David his ten thousands, and that he should lead the vanguard. Then David would have had no way out. He would have had to lead the vanguard and attack Israel, because the three thousand people were as good as hostages in Philistia.

But God had to make David king over Israel and bring about the work of salvation through his descendants. So God used the commanders’ distrust to spare David the worst that was coming to him. This is the heart of God, who loves David to the end, even after his foolish choice. When you meet hardship and crisis, God is weighing your faith. If you fail to overcome it and compromise with the world, you will meet greater trouble, as David did. So persevere wisely, in faith.

After listening to the princes’ advice, King Achish called David in, carefully. He told David that he liked him and trusted him, but since his commanders said they could not trust him, David should go back to his place in peace. Something truly like a miracle had happened to David. But with God’s wisdom hidden from him, David could no longer see far ahead in the world, and even while God was helping him, he went on acting foolishly. If we are not spiritually sensitive, we do not realize it even when God is helping us.

In verse 8, when Achish told him to go back, David did something absurd. He protested, asking what he had done wrong that Achish should distrust him. He asked why, when he had served Achish faithfully as his servant to this day, he could not go and fight against the enemies of his lord the king. Of course, David was likely putting on a show of excessive loyalty to Achish that did not match what was in his heart. But the moment David, who knew God’s will, said this to win Achish’s favor, he became the most foolish of men before God, committed a great sin as God’s servant, and failed as a man of faith. Even if he did not mean it when he said he would go too, the words had already come out of David’s mouth. So God would have been angry as he watched David go on lying after disobeying his command.

Far from offering God a prayer of thanks for bringing him through the crisis, David swore loyalty to Achish and said he was sorry not to join the war against Israel. That was a foolish act that brought trouble on himself. For if King Achish had mistakenly believed that David deeply regretted missing the battle, he would surely have made David take part in the next one.

We too are making this mistake today. To take one example, under Japanese colonial rule, when Shinto shrine worship was being forced on people, there were pastors and church members who said that since the times were bad, they should bow at the shrines for now and wait for their chance. Later they said they had never betrayed God. There were also pastors who asked who would preach the gospel if all the ministers were killed for refusing shrine worship. By their reasoning, the pastors and believers who were martyred become fools. For those who bowed made the same choice David did: in spite of God’s command, they chose to keep themselves alive, or to escape suffering.

David had been loyal and devoted to God until then, yet once he drifted away from God, he tore down with his own hands the faith he had built up. God’s keeping him from going to war was grace, yet to David, winning Achish’s trust right then mattered more. Suppose the commanders had heard what David said to Achish to have his loyalty recognized, and had told him to prove that he meant what he had just said. What would David have chosen then? When people throw away wisdom, this is how they fail to think about what comes next.

David had disobeyed God’s command, yet God caused the commanders to dislike him in order to protect his life. David did not grasp this purpose of God and kept on with foolish words and deeds. God, who loves souls, gives chance after chance, but those who have left God cannot take hold of a chance for blessing even when he gives it. So foolish people say that since another chance will come even if they do not live by God’s word, it is fine to live more or less as they please for now. Of course, God always gives his children chances to turn back, but once people grow spiritually dark, they cannot receive a chance as a chance.

The Philistine princes hesitated to go into battle with David because they saw him as a man of God, or as a leader of Israel. Yet David himself was doing what a child of God should not do. However hard you try to blend in when you go out into the world, the people of the world do not accept you as one of their own. For spirit sees spirit, so the first thing they see is God, who holds you in his arms. If, like David, you are receiving God’s love and protection and yet do not recognize that love, you will fall into the abyss before the Philistines, God’s enemies. Only when you hope for God’s grace with unshaken faith can you easily overcome Satan’s tests.

God had kept David out of the war with Israel, yet David kept acting foolishly. So God did not hold back the trouble that came upon him, the Amalekite attack. Having won King Achish’s favor, David came home pleased that he had handled things wisely, only to find that the children and women had all been taken away to Amalek. God was showing him that it was not because he and his six hundred mighty men guarded them that he had been able to live in peace with those vulnerable people until then. After losing his family, David would have realized that he had been foolish. It may seem that we earn money by our own ability, keep our homes, and raise our children, but it is possible only because God’s grace protects us. If we forget that and grow proud, God will take away his hedge of protection, as he did with David, and trouble will pour in like a flood.

David had heard God’s word from Samuel and, as he prayed, through the Holy Spirit, and he had been led by God until now. But once he was gripped by his own thinking, he forgot it all, both what Samuel had told him and the Word he had heard from God directly. Samuel had heard God’s voice directly and passed it on to David, and the Holy Spirit is God, so everything David heard was God’s will. Even a man like David, who heard all this, stumbled. Seeing that, we must live all the more carefully. For the hardships the world brings can be borne by God’s grace, but the discipline God gives cannot be borne by anything.

Those who pray to God even about small things, repent, and turn back every day will receive eternal blessing. Remember that the broad road looks safe but may be a path of thorns. May you obey according to God’s will. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.

1 Samuel 30:1-10

1When David and his men had come to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid on the South, and on Ziklag, and had struck Ziklag, and burned it with fire, 2and had taken captive the women and all who were in it, both small and great. They didn’t kill any, but carried them off, and went their way. 3When David and his men came to the city, behold, it was burned with fire; and their wives, their sons, and their daughters were taken captive. 4Then David and the people who were with him lifted up their voice and wept until they had no more power to weep. 5David’s two wives were taken captive, Ahinoam the Jezreelitess, and Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite. 6David was greatly distressed; for the people spoke of stoning him, because the souls of all the people were grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters; but David strengthened himself in Yahweh his God. 7David said to Abiathar the priest, the son of Ahimelech, “Please bring the ephod here to me.” Abiathar brought the ephod to David. 8David inquired of Yahweh, saying, “If I pursue after this troop, will I overtake them?” He answered him, “Pursue; for you will surely overtake them, and will without fail recover all.” 9So David went, he and the six hundred men who were with him, and came to the brook Besor, where those who were left behind stayed. 10But David pursued, he and four hundred men; for two hundred stayed behind, who were so faint that they couldn’t go over the brook Besor.