1 Samuel 27:1 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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1 Samuel 27:1

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Buoyed up with such a victory you come to chapter 27. You think surely there must be a gap between chapter 26 and 27. Could the calamity of chapter 27 so closely follow on from the great demonstration of preservation given in chapter 26? ‘And David said in his heart, I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul.’ Abigail was certain that he would be king, and she was there. Maybe she heard him say this. Can you imagine that she would have said, ‘No, no. O David you will be king. The Lord has told you, shown you; you have been anointed by the prophet Samuel, he will see you through.’ But no, David’s faith seems to have failed him. Now he is certain: ‘I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul.’ And then he goes on: ‘There is nothing better for me’ – ‘the only hope, and the best hope for me is to trust the Philistines’, who he is commissioned by God to defend his nation from. ‘And Saul shall despair me, to seek me any more in any coast of Israel.’ So his faith fails.‘David said in his heart.’ He didn't share it with Abishai. He didn't share it either with Abiathar, the son of the priest, who was now the acting officiating high priest who carried the ephod and was with David. He didn't seem to share it with anybody. Of course you can't always be certain of this, but the narrative doesn't say he sought the Lord, as it so frequently does in the great affairs of David's life. He ‘said in his heart’. He discussed this only with himself. Some of the greatest dangers for us come when we are discussing things only with ourselves, and we are reasoning things out, and we start to get things out of balance. ‘And David said in his heart, I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul.’ This is his reasoning. It is a time of self-pity for David. Now you and I may fall into self-pity over quite small things. David had a great deal to contend with. Would there be a mutiny among his six hundred men or discontent? After all, David’s they were not chosen crack troops; they were all malcontents. There were people who gravitated to him because they were dissatisfied, oppressed, or in debt, one thing and another. They were not primarily willing volunteer soldiers, out in the wilderness month after month. There were a lot of things for David to contend with, that are only mentioned once or twice in the narrative. Don't forget he had been a shepherd; he was the son of a sort of rural sheik. He had also been at the household of Saul, and he had been a general for him. He had had all the adulation and support and power and authority, and now he is living year after year from hand to mouth in the wilderness. So he comes at some time to a phase of self-pity. He focused on his miseries. He focused on the power of Saul and his troops, and his continuing venom. He thought of the lack of faith among the six hundred. Even his most earnest lieutenants who would accompany him right to Saul’s side, didn't really agree with his reasoning that he was the Lord's anointed, and God would take him and that Saul mustn't be killed. They weren’t people of faith as he was. And so his conclusion was, ‘there is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape.’ He should have known that it is Satan that keeps all the negative ideas turning, so that the wrong side of the scale is weighed down and you come to completely the wrong conclusion. There is no sign here that David puts the other side to himself, as he speaks to himself and reasons with himself. Had not Gad said, ‘God's instruction is to go to Judah not to Gath’? If he had thought about that, that would have drawn him back. And what about the disaster of the previous time he went to Gath, and how it turned out? And what about the praise he gave to God in Psalms 34 and 56, on his remarkable deliverance from the king of Gath? None of those things came into the equation, and so down he went.

Application

David doesn't review his anointing: ‘But I am anointed to be king. God has set me aside and his prophet came and with remarkable betokenings I was anointed to be king. God will keep this promise; God will see me through.’ He stops looking at that, and it is the same with us. ‘But I am a child of God. I am saved. Christ, the eternal Son, came from heaven. Yes, for billions of people, and for me. And he set his love upon me, and suffered and died for me, and bore the punishment for my sin, and in due course by his Spirit, he drew me to himself out of all my rebellion, and he blessed me and saved me, and he has been with me all life's journey, and he said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.’ That's what we need to think about, not shutting out the glorious things, the promises, and mulling over the difficult things. And that's the mistake that David made. We do not think we are stronger than him. The very opposite. It is why the Bible is so faithful in recording his fall: so that we shall say, if such a giant as David, who had held out for so long, could fall, how much more can we, unless we think properly when things seem dismal, and when we are down, and when we are oppressed. We must think as Christians, and remember the promises of God and the work and the love, and the integrity of our dear Saviour, our great Saviour.

Faith is always vulnerable to failure. The faith of the most faithful Christian is susceptible to failure. We don't possess faith which cannot be cracked and frayed and diminished. In fact faith by itself is bound to fail. What are we saying? Well faith must be fastened to something. It must be faith in something. Obviously our faith is in God. While David's faith was in God it was sound. When it became just faith hanging in the air by itself, it was subject to failure. Faith is like a plant which takes a very tight hold upon another plant, or upon a wall, or some substrate. You try to pull it off. Some plants you can pull off fairly easily, but there are other plants which you cannot pull them off. They are so powerfully attached that you cannot dislodge them. If you were to see that plant not attached to that tree or wall, you would find it a floppy thing; in itself it is an inherently insubstantial weak thing. But attached so that wall or that tree, you need a lot of power to pull it up. It illustrates faith. If your faith isn't attached, it's weak. It is only when it is attached that it is useful and powerful and strong. David: his faith was no longer attached to the promises of God, and the prophecies that God had made toward him. It was no longer attached; it was a floppy thing, and so is yours, and so is mine. You may look at a Christian and say, ‘Oh I admire that man, I admire that woman; they have great faith.’ Nobody has great faith unless it is attached. What counts is what the faith is attached to. If David had continued to attach his faith to the evidences that he had: the lion and the bear, when he was a young man, and he defeated them with his bare hands, with all the deliverances that God had given him, even twice over along the lines that we have just been speaking of, where Saul had his spear and cruise of water removed while sleeping, and previously the hem of his garment taken away; why even those were great evidences to David of how, in the Lord, the weak can overcome the strong; the one with six hundred can overcome the one with three thousand, easily, if God is in it. But his faith was no longer in the demonstrations, the evidences, the great battle with Goliath. Faith could have been attached to these immovable evidences, and it wasn't. So he failed. From the great David, holy man, so used of God, we learn the possibility of the failure of faith, and we take steps accordingly.

If you have had great deliverances and blessings, and you are going through a trial right now, but you have real answers to prayer, then your faith is in God and his character and his power and his love; it is in his promises. You may be one of those Christians who when you see a powerful promise, you copy it out, and put it in the back of your Bible, and you learn it by heart, because faith needs to be attached to things, and you keep them in mind. Great doctrines of the faith: you remember them, and rehearse them in your mind, and meditate so that your faith clings onto them. You read the Scripture every day, and the Spirit blesses – you can't feel the Holy Spirit in any physical way – but when you read the Scripture prayerfully, you have the evidence of his presence and his work, because the passage warms your heart, and thrills you, or challenges you, and you are assured of your salvation, and you come to God in rejoicing prayer. The evidence of the work of the Spirit; you can feel that. Faith must be attached, whether it is to the evidences of his work: to the Scriptures, to the promises, and best of all Christ himself, to God himself. In your Scripture reading, whatever you are reading, always break off for frequent periods to read the Gospels, so that you are reading about Christ the Saviour, and his character and his actions and his words. Christians love to feed their souls on that. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘I've been studying Ezekiel, and I got halfway and I decided to go back to the Gospels for three weeks.’ Return to where the Lord has trodden. Your faith then attaches itself to him, the perfect glorious holy infallible Man of love.

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1 Samuel 27:1 Commentary and Bible Study