1 Samuel 30:16 Commentary and Bible Study

Then a further provision of God: ‘When he had brought him down’, with his mere four hundred men, ‘behold, they were spread abroad upon all the earth, eating and drinking, and dancing.’ Many of them dead drunk evidently, others still eating and drinking and dancing and half tipsy, because of all the great spoil that they had taken out of the land of the Philistines and out of the land of Judah. So amazingly, there was not going to be much resistance, and so David is able to begin to deal with that raiding party. ‘And David smote them from the twilight even unto the evening of the next day:’ – there was an enormous number of them – ‘and there escaped not a man of them, save four hundred young men, which rode upon camels’, who managed to flee. Well, how many must there have been if the language says there escaped not a man of them save four hundred, implying that that was only a small fraction of the army that had been marshalled by the Amalekites? However many were there? Several thousand at least. What a provision: that they had started to celebrate and got themselves drunk and quite incapacitated, and unable to defend themselves! As a result David recovered everything, and there was absolutely nothing missing. He not only recovered the wives and children, and everything that had been taken from Ziklag, but there was vast spoil as well, because the Amalekites had been raiding huge areas of territory in the south.But then look what happens. ‘And David took all the flocks and the herds, which they drave before those other cattle’ – this tremendous amount of spoil – ‘and [they] said,’ – the verb is plural; these are the people’s words, not David’s – ‘This is David's spoil.’ What a turnaround! A short while ago they were ready to stone him; now they are is so proud of him: ‘This is David's spoil.’ This is the old David back again as far as the people are concerned; of course he is back with the Lord. In other words, David's renewal of his faith, his consulting of God, his calming the whole situation down when they were going to kill him, strengthening himself in the Lord, and taking hold of the situation; everybody knew David's faith had been resuscitated, and he had renewed his covenant with God, and God was with him, and something which seemed impossible had happened as the result, and the old David and his victories and his conquests was back.So David can be restored. But his restoration was painful to him. You can look at the passage and say, not painful enough! David had behaved very, very poorly. But God's disciplines are always tempered with kindness and mercy towards his people. You get in those chapters – just looking at it from this point of view – a picture of two cases: Saul, the purely nominal believer who is lost, and David, the backslidden believer, who God will restore even if it requires a discipline because the wandering, the waywardness, has been so great, and so unworthy. But God will reveal himself again, and deliver him, and restore him and re-establish him, and give him a great abundance of evidence of his goodness and power for the future. You see the two classes of person played out in those chapters.